Its not the hardware (tablets)

There has been all this talk about tablets lately (thanks to apple) but I hear so many reasons why tablets haven't taken off (and MS has been pushing tablets for close to ten years); to me its the software. I am typing this out on my HTC TyTN II and it, even though it is mobile is sub optimal in terms of software, I try to just use my fingers for some apps but others I must use a pen, and still others I have to flip out my keyboard... Its the software people, make software where people can effectively us all apps with their fingers, and encourage useful innovative apps on of course reasonable hardware and tablets will be gold. I wouldn't mind having one if I cal run home automation software, home theater/universal remote software, multi-format ebook reader, front mounted camera for video chat and yeah I might splurge... I am really leaning towards some sort of Android Internet tablet as I don't see the need for much storage when I have multiple terrabytes of network accessible storage in my house. There are lots of android tablets out there now but there is talk that the next version of android will have lots of tablet optimizations so as hard as it will be I think I will hang on a bit longer and take a looksee at tablets with this new Android tablet optimized OS when it comes out (sometime next year). Until then I will continue struggling with trying to set my 6.x WinMo phone up as my univ-remote... sigh.

The maturing of Linux… applications.

For years, since I installed (very very painfully) Slackware Linux v2.1 in 1995 I have heard about how Linux is “ready for the masses”, at the time it was totally untrue and now… well it is as ready as windows but… 

To sidetrack for a bit, I was recently ogling over a nice bit of freeware and gave a copy to my colleague who equally appreciated the usefulness of the software and my comment to him was it is nice to have someone around that appreciates a good piece of software (if we were more geek-inclined we would have been ogling over the code) and his response was “most people just use a computer as a glorified typewriter” which is not far from the truth. That is most people still don’t understand computers very well… it seems that nowadays if you can use facebook and an iPhone you are considered a computer savvy person but most of those people would have mental meltdowns if they were asked to do a fresh install of windows or Mac OS X not to mention Linux. I would argue that now Linux’s main weakness is not its usability but more the weakness of its application base. Now mind you, there are some damn good/rock solid Linux software out there but it is not accessible to the masses as there is still a lot of Linux software that requires a healthy dose of comandline kungfu to use (care to even imagine how to edit a video using a command prompt driven piece of software?). I have argued many times that that most people just need a browser, an office suite, and solitaire and they are set… Linux can totally do those things, but I digress.

But now, it seems that Linux applications are coming of age. I was recently looking for a good alternative to Adobe Premiere and found the Wikipedia video editing software comparison page and noticed, most of the free editing packages out there are… Linux only?! I went to many of these sites and without having used the software I can truthfully say these are very capable pieces of software, worlds away from MS Movie Maker for sure. I was floored that there were only 1 or 2 freeware windows video editing programs compared to the 8-10 programs for Linux. This is not a bad thing, as I think I have mentioned in a previous post, my primary reason for using windows is the availability of applications out there, but I am happy to report that gap appears to be narrowing.

OpenOffice.Org demos ribbon-style UI prototype

I just read a bit "OpenOffice.Org demos ribbon-style UI prototype". I am totally not a fan of the "ribbon style" in MSO or (apparently) the up and coming open office. While i admit that my compu-kungfu isn't what it used to be I am still not bad with figuring out and getting used to new programs but this new ribbon style gui is beyond me. I actually installed MSO 2007 specifically so i could make myself get accustomed to it but after a year i still find myself hunting around trying to figure out how to do this or that function that was just a drop down menu aways in MSO 2003.

The death of Google's "Do no evil" mantra

I recently came across an article "Google's not fighting Gmail subpoenas" that tells about how google is just handing over the information of some of its users. I remember reading about an instance where google denied (but eventually had to cave) the DoJ (or was it FBI?) access to IP addresses or emails or something, either way it seemed like they tried to do the right thing; but now, this seems to be part of a downward spiral for google, hopefully privacy groups will successfully take google to task for this.

Fantasies of a computer hobbyist

Asides from the obvious (lewd) ones which I will not go into I am dreaming of an i7 Core with USB v3.0. Yup, those are the two biggies for me. Of course gratuitous amounts of memory (4+ gigabytes, which means i would need a 64bit OS which again means i would need a realtively powerful [or at least new] computer), a really fast hard drive etc but right now I need a fast processor and speedy external storage.

I am working on three huge tasks which require CPUs of the workhorse variety.

Task #1 Graphics: I have about 35,000 photos that I am sifting through and organizing. This involves everything from image stitching to geotagging to retouching to IPTC keyword tagging etc and in large batches.

Task #2 Audio: I have about 28,000 songs to sift through, the sifting is apparently the most laborious part as I have whole albums that I only one 2-3 songs out of but there is other stuff such as adding acoustical fingerprints, MusicBrainz IDs, finding duplicates, etc.

Task 3# Video: I have video from the internet, and tons of video from the past 8 years of digital camera ownership. I want to start chopping, cropping, combining, and editing this stuff into something watchable (to just string all the stuff together would be insanely boring to watch).

Geekness (techno geek, not the chicken head eating geek): This isn't a task but is a point dealing with techno-lust. I  love linux, i don't use it nearly as much as i would like primarily because the majority of applications i need are  windows  only (though the things i use the most , like Opera, are also available in linux). There is a way to run two operating systems at once (wrap your head around that!) with virtualization but that requires heaps of memory and a hefty CPU doesn't hurt. As I alluded to previously a 32bit operating system  has a 2 gigabyte memory limit, that is i don't think it can use more than 2gb of memory no matter how much memory you actually have installed so to run dual operating systems (running windows 7 inside of linux) would require alot of memory and in order to use all the physical memory installed you need a 64bit OS)... got it? Not to mention that alot of video/audio/graphic editing (especially batch editing) requires insane amounts of memory.

All of the above requires semi-to-very serious processing power (which the i7 will handily be able to provide) and serious storage (not to mention read/write speeds). A geek reading this might say “what about eSATA?!” but if you look at the USB v3.0 speeds (4gbit/sec) compared to eSATA II (3Gbit/sec) there is no comparison. Of course the biggest problems now are that 

#1 Due to my globetrotting line of work I need something semi-portable (which means a mobile Core i7 [Clarksfield] which won’t be out for another month or two and won’t come down to a price that mere mortals can afford until after the new year) 
#2 USB v3.0 isn’t expected to be out en masse until mid 2010, Windows 7 doesn’t even have drivers for it yet.

As painful as it will certainly be I am thinking I need to hold off until the second quarter of 2010 at least before I get something. By then hopefully USB v3 will be out, prices will have come down, software support will be out (with major bugs fixed)… but damn that’s a long time to wait.

The impersonal nature of the extra personal networking sites

I accept that networking can be pretty impersonal, and the masters are those who can network and make every networkee feel like there is a personal connection; I am not one of those people. Now comes all these social services, like FaceBook (which is a bit more personal since there tends to be a less business like air about it) and LinkedIn which is a bit less personal due to its business angle... but the gaps between the two are narrowing.

I just received another invite through LinkedIn from a person I know of but hardly know personally, which is a step up from those i have never even heard of, and it was simply a "X wants to connect with you". I got another invite via Facebook which was almost the exact same thing, which is a bit more insulting to me in Facebook because both of these are generic invites but facebook is supposed to be more personal and in facebook i *thought* the purpose was to make friends not contacts. Anyway, I have inboxes in facebook and linkedin full of unaccepted invites. I have made it a point that anyone I invite (very few so far) I include a personal message to, to at the very least not give the appearance of totally superficiality be it for facebook or linkedin... I thought these two services were supposed to promote socialization but they seem to have done the opposite with people taking the attitude of who-ever-dies-with-the-most-online-friends/contacts-wins... sigh.

Google should take geocities

I recently heard on the futuretense podcast that Yahoo would be closing geocities sometime in the near future. The covered how some organization "Archive Team" is trying to copy as much of geocities as they can. The first thing that came to my mind was "isn't archive.org doing this?" (apparenlty they stopped archiving geocities in 2002) but today i was studying up on using regular expressions (regex) in the Vim editor and found a webpage... on geocities (I guess Yahoo hasn't taken it down yet). After i noticed this it popped into my head, hey, google should buy geocities! Google now has its own webpages for its users and i would think that Geocities would be a steal now (plus google has already taken another icon from the pre-internet bubble age "De Ja News" and managed to monetize it why not geocities?

Anyway, hopefully someone will take geocities, as the "Archive Team" mentioned, there are alot of pages on geocities (including one of my own which i haven't accessed in years) which ind of give one a peek into the days-of-internet-yore; it would be a shame to loose that.

Getting harder to be anonymous

I have a facebook account but prefer not to advertise myself too much but now i am finding that other people who have pictures of me (like group shots) are now tagging me in those photos. As much as i do online i prefer to keep things private like where i live, phone, and photos etc
but that gets a bit difficult when people start posting photos of me (so far group photos) online... grrrr.

I have been accused of wearing my emotions on my sleeve but people on facebook take it to a whole new level. Another observation is that i seem to be almost totally friend-less since i have under 20 "friends" and many facebookers seem to literally have hundreds! I think i have invited maybe 2 people to "be my friends" but all the others have contacted me and even of all those who contact me i don't accept. I don't think i am being a snob but i kind of think, did i ever talk to
these people when i was around them (or did they ever talk to me), does this person have anything in common with me (for the few random friend invitations i have gotten from total strangers), and can I stand being associated with these people? (the epitome of snobbery but hey, there are some folks out there who i view as repulsive, slimy, hopelessly annoying etc and i think it would be rather insincere to accept them as "friends" when i view them in such lights).

Anyway, this whole social networking internet thing is a bit much for me, i perhaps i "just don't get it" though i do see its utility so its probably more accurate to say its a combination of
online-anti-social-ness and not "getting it". oh well.

Multi-post what i am doing

I have noticed that lots and lots of apps (applications and websites) have options to add little blurbs about what you are doing/thinking/etc, and then there is twitter which is a tell everyone whatever you want all the time (potentially annoying if you ask me but hey). I am waaaay too lazy to change these things as something pops into my head but if there was a way (a website service?) that can update all the places at once, that is I could say "trying to find a translator to hire" (which was what i was doing all last week, actually my staff was doing the searching i was doing the interviewing) and it would show up in facebook, linkedin, skype, and twitter, or whatever.

I am actually surprised that i haven't been able to find such a thing but thats fine, it just popped into my head.

Using the Internet as an information source for help as opposed to a source for copying.

I am presently teaching a business communications ESL course at American University in Kabul and am learning more about teaching every day.

When I was in school (even in 2005) there wasn’t nearly as much information online as there is now (and there certainly wasn’t as much back during undergrad in the 90s). Without a doubt this information boom has been a blessing, no two ways about it, but the misuse or abuse of this information has become more and more disturbing to me. In the US I have heard about problems related to plagiarism etc but for those who are caught there are very stiff penalties (a friend of mine was expelled from school for a year and all she did was copy someone’s homework). In the developing world it is a different story. There are almost no laws about not claiming someone else’s intellectual work as your own and even if there are laws they are routinely ignored. I admit that I am perhaps a bit flexible about “fair use” but profiting off of someone else’s work or claiming someone else’s work as your own really really bothers me. In the class I am teaching I routinely catch students blatantly copying from the internet and not citing the copied work (or worse claiming it as your own); even worse many of the international students from developing countries in my grad school program routinely copied the work of others (and didn’t get caught nearly as often as they should have). I have heard worse stories from friends who are/were professional teachers having papers submitted with the URLs still in the header with students swearing it was their own work.

This is one of those “I can identify the problem, but don’t know the solution” things, if I was to treat my students as my friend in undergrad was treated I would have a class that was 1/3^rd its original size. I have had to stress repeatedly that un-cited work will not be counted (they are presently working on final projects) all this and I am not even requiring the work be cited according to any particular standard (I had to use APA), just tell me how I can find the information if I wanted to refer back to it… and many of them still are not getting it.

God bless comic book movies

I was never one for comic books, for some reason I could never get into them. I suppose I should have grown up by now in terms of taste but it (arguably) hasn’t happened. Enter computer animation of the last 10 years, creativity, and the epiphany that Marvel Comics had that there is serious money to be made here. Yes, of course we have had movies based on comic books for years but I think (sorry, no actual research) that the number of comic book based films has started to increase in frequency. Due to the “fantastic” nature of comic book characters I’d say that producing these types of films with all the needed special effects was a Star Wars sized proposition (which was cool as hell in its day but almost passé nowadays). With a move in the “incredible effects” direction (using cgi) with the debut of Terminator 2 and later the Matrix special effect has grown to jaw dropping capability.

 

For various reasons my taste in movies has become pretty shallow in that great special effects, reasonable acting, and an ok storyline is usually enough to get me to watch something (of course gratuitous violence and sex always helps J). I’d say that these comic stories (which are ripe for storylines and cool scifi concepts) along with Hollywood today makes for really entertaining viewing.

Google is a content producer... kinda.

I was just listening to an NPR podcast where the host was interviewing Google’s head Mobile Software design person (regarding Google’s new mobile OS for phones) and the host asked “so how will you make money off this” and the software design person gave some nebulous answer which the host seemed to understand and reworded Google’s entire business model in a way that I have never heard before, Google is like a TV producer making shows people want to watch then getting revenue from the targeted advertising, that is things like Google maps, gmail, Google groups, and now Android are just services (like TV shows) that people want to use (or in the case of TV shows, watch) and then Google makes money off the advertisements.

 

Perhaps everyone out there has thought of it this way already, and indeed I understood how Google made their money but I never heard it described like this host did, the simplest explanation I have heard to date.

 

Computer Protection Bloat

I just recently finished my yearly evaluation of antispyware, firewalls, and antivirus programs and switched to different antivirus and anti-spyware programs (the firewall still rated pretty high). Since the programs tend to change in effectiveness (for example, back in the day Norton antivirus was a hoss at finding/nuking viruses; now it tends to fall behind some other antivirus programs) almost every 6 months but since I am lazy I don’t bother researching them except every year. The best free (non-cracked since I try to avoid that stuff nowadays) antivirus seems to be antivir and best (free) antispyware seems to be SpywareTerminator, and Comodo is still one of the better firewalls out there or so I have concluded after reading the reviews, forums, etc.

 

My main grip is bloat. Three programs (six processes) take up over 85mb of memory on my computer now I do have a gigabyte of memory (which doesn’t go as it used to) but it still feels like bloat. I didn’t start to use antivirus/spyware software until about two years ago, I believe I am savvy enough to identify viruses via email on flash drives etc (looking for strange hidden files, executable attachments etc) but its gotten over my head and especially where I work now (where they have no sense of computer security and are the USB flash drive happiest people I have ever seen) this security is really needed.

 

What actually prompted me to post this was that I had also been looking for a functional IM client that was small and efficient and I came across Miranda, after seeing that and other programs like utorrent I have come to the conclusion that there are a lot of lazy programmers out there (ironically all the security software I use is produced by companies were as Miranda and utorrent are open source community efforts) that could make their code a lot more streamlined and stable.

 

Oh well.

 

 

 

Obligated Opera (browswer) Fanboi

Well I use the Opera browser and have been for years and have consistently found it to be the best of the best (though FireFox with its extensions does give Opera a run for its money). On their site they asked users to post this video to help show people what the new Opera 9.5 is capable of:

Opera Mini 4
Uploaded by operasoftware

The eeepc as a portable server?

I have been trying to follow uber cheap laptops for awhile  mainly because I want a server and I am abroad alot, I’ve been following a bunch of them but it has pretty much come down to the EEEPC and the OLPC

 

My needs for a server are kinda minimal, I guess because assuming it has enough USB ports I can plug in most of the extra functionality I need.

 

My criteria are as follows:

 

1. Extra Small (can pack up and be take to the next place without needing to rent a shipping container)
2. WiFi enabled (preferably Wireless N)
3. Minimum of two USB ports, four would be better (of course this could be remedied with a USB dongle but I hate those things)
4. Low power usage / Long battery life
5. Cheap
6. Doesn’t have too much funky hardware (i.e. can install Linux on it ok)
7. And a few other things I can’t think of now

 

It seems like the EEEPC would probably be the best choice in this situation while the OLPC would be better for individual users/schools as a primary laptop. I would be interested in seeing if the EEEPC could be saddled with a larger/cheaper non-solid-state hard drive but that is not critical.

 

The things I would use my server for are:

 

1. Printing from other gizmos
2. Scanning (I hate connecting/disconnecting stuff from my primary notebook when I want to carry it around so the less stuff the better)
3. Super customizable firewall
4. Always on VoIP &/or Asterisk/PBX
5. Network handling (that is, give my primary computer & VoIP priority over everything else, QoS/balancing)
6. Running long processes (like panoramic stitching, video rendering etc [yes, on the EEEPC I would be *really* slow but I don’t care so long as my primary device isn’t slowed down])
7. P2P downloading (so I can have emule and bittorrent running on it instead of my primary computer)
8. File server (not sure about this one, I’ve been drooling over the thought of getting the D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay NAS and loading it up with two terabyte drives)
9. DVR (I haven’t investigated this too much yet but I am positive there is some USB gizmo that would allow me to connect to a satellite or cable box)

 

Yeah, that’s about it for now. I am betting some people would say “just get an old desktop” and indeed I know rich expats who toss most of their stuff

 

 

GPS Rox!!!

Well I *finally* got around to incorporating GPS data into my pictures, first I had to get my hands on a GPS device then some software that could match the time stamps of the photos to the times that each coordinate was taken (Turn on tracking on the GPS device) and viola! The Latitude and Longitude data is embedded in the JPEG photo. I know most people are like “so what” well with this you can see exactly where you took the picture. There are softwares that use online maps (IDimager, Picoplo, and WWMX to name a few) and there are online services that will automatically place the pictures on a map. I use Fickr.com and they have this service so if you click on some of my newer pictures and then select “map” (on the right under “Additional Information”) it will show you where the picture was taken on a map, nice!

Water/Thermoelectric cooling for everything!

Ok, not for everything. I was thinking about how hot my office chair gets and how to avoid the sweaty back syndrome. The chair is oh so cushy (good) but I am not sure the same level of cushiness could be maintained if ventilation was added so I was thinking why not a cooled chair? My folks have a Volvo and nice as it is my favorite part (in the winter at least) is the heated seats if it works for warming a car seat then why not cooling an office chair? Well I’m no engineer but having tinkered with computer overclocking and modding I have toyed (a wee bit) with peltier coolers and it seems to me that a combo of water and peltier cooling could make for a pretty comfy chair… though I could be wrong.

YouTube for Productivity?

I am a ADD/Dyslexia poster child and needless to say easily distracted but for whatever reason I never spent much time on sites like YouTube (subconscious repulsion by the sensory overload?). Anyway, i was reading over yet another GTD like post (on lifehacker this time) extolling the virtues of the Quicksilver productivity app which was making me really jealous (though i do have a love affair going with FARR which keeps my jealousy in check). I have read tons about quicksilver but never really seen it in action and all of a sudden it popped into my head, "maybe there is some demo of quicksilver on YouTube". I'm not sure why it hadn't occurred to me before, I had actually wasted a significant amount of time drooling over the linux XGL/Beryl video captures (highly recommended if you like nice graphical desktops) on YouTube. So i took a look and sure enough there were tons of Quicksilver videos, many of them tutorials, I thought, "Maybe there are other application like tutorials" so i looked up a video on using Del.icio.us and viola! that was there as well.

The point of this is that YouTube is a great resource for instructional videos, no they aren't all professional and some are easier to follow than others but the convenience of it is pretty darn nifty eh?