Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
The alumni gathering went to sea this weekend when we were invited onto Johan's 32-footer based in V�rmd�. We set off into a chill (around 10C) but sunny archipelago and set course for Sandhamn. The crew was Johan as captain, David and Calle as able seamen, and Jonas and yours truly as ballast.
After one and a half hours leisurly cruise we docked at Sandhamn and had lunch in the cockpit. After a coffee in the yacht club bar Jonas left us to go back to town, while the rest of the gang headed east, out to open sea.
The wind being more or less aft, we decided to hoist the spinnaker. This bumped our speed up to around 6 knots, but when we turned up into the wind to make the return leg to our planned overnight anchorage we had to take it in.
The route to the west was strewn with those reefs and boulders that make the Stockholm archipelago such an interesting place to sail in, but we managed by dint of having 3 lookouts and a GPS. With the sun setting we thought of checking the coming weather, which of course we did by visiting SHMI with a mobile phone. Based on this information we decided to lie in a bay facing south, as the wind was going to be northerly.
After some backing and filling we managed to find an anchorage. Calle made the first course, asparagus wrapped in proscuitto with mozarella. After we'd eaten this, Johan and David ascended a steep cliff with the help of a rope to barbecue the steaks. We ate them with rice and a sallad of ruccola and tomatoes. The dessert was pear halves with dark chocolate and some nice cheeses.
Replete with food and three bottles of wine, there wasn't much else to do except go to bed. Despite the cold, we slept well.
Morning was early, cold, and full of dishes. But we managed to get underway quite soon and made good time make to the harbour.
All in all a very nice experience. Maybe a yearly tradition in the future?
Pictures will be posted as soon as I get some links.
Redemption Ark by Alistair Reynolds.
The second part of the Inhibitor trilogy. Nice enough read. Reynolds can't do love scenes, or feelings at all for that matter, but makes up for it in plot and sense-of-wonder.
Russ is giving a talk at Web 2.0. From his post:
Not only are the numbers there (160 million Americans with mobile phones), but every American carrier has reasonably priced unlimited data plans. [...] This gives the U.S. a huge advantage over other markets around the world which continue to charge by the kilobyte.
Right! The Yanks are gonna clean our clocks -- again! Just because the carriers are so short-sighted that they can't see that when it comes to mobile data, cheaper traffic means more traffic! The net is addictive, but right now everyone's scared of the kB charges.
Make a short-term dent in your revenue, reap the benefits later. Otherwise, the US will OWN the mobile data services space.
Update: Frank agrees.
Some more opinion points:
As Matt said, what if audio blogs are the Next Great Thing, and we curmudgeons missed it? So as to be able to snidely comment on this phenomenon from a position of knowledge, I pulled down yesterdays Daily Source Code by Adam Curry, and put it on the taco, my trusty N-Gage.
OK, step one was accomplished, and I didn't need those near-obligatory accessories, a $300 iPod and a $1,500 Mac. That's nice, because I can't afford either.
I started listening on my way home (5 minute walk, 35 minute subway ride, 7 minute walk). The taco is a nice enough mp3-player, but it lacks a fast-forward feature. I pressed pause to avoid looking like a zombie and read a book instead, but when I tried resuming, it started from the beginning. Obviously, an iPod would handle this better, as would any dedicated mp3 player.
Adam is involved in iPodder.org which he intends to turn into a centre for podcasting. Well, that's all well and good, but if he wants creating and listening to podcasts to become mainstream, he'd better get a better, less iPod-specific name. Now you get the impression that it's only for Mac + iPod users. Also, Apple's lawyers may have some things to say to him.
The post itself was entertaining, I'll say that. It sure beats trying to find new music to listen to, and fills a niche that FM radio perhaps can't fill. But still, the Net is about TEXT, goddammit. Audio is all well and good for music and entertainment, but for information, the bandwidth is wasted. I may be able to read articles and blog posts "interstitially" at work, filling those blank pauses when I task-switch from one issue to another, but I can't multitask enough to listen to speech.
Also, the barriers to entry are pretty high, both for producers and consumers. A blog poster needs to be able to handle a web form and a keyboard. An audioblogger needs mics, audio software, BANDWIDTH, and audio nous, not too widely available. Lots more talented writers than talented radio artists, but that may change as podcasting becomes more popular.
Consumers need: a fast net connection, an mp3-player, a modern computer, an intimate knowledge of RSS (version 2.0, no less), and weird and wonderful "iPodder" software, which, despite it's name, is not tied to an iPod. Go figure.
Who's the audience? The web is available to perhaps 20% percent of the planet's population. Of this percentage, maybe 15% wander outside MSN et al. Of these, 10% read blogs. Perhaps 5% of these listen to podcasts. But I bet 99% of these are white, and male, and live in the US and Western Europe.
However, for all its flaws, audio blogging is much much better than that next scourge, videoblogging. That will be scary. Until then, I'll stick to text, thank you very much.
For some reason (probably because I feel an itch to hack) I was thinking about Plan 9 today. So it seemed an omen that /. had a call for questions for Rob Pike, co-creator of Unix and Plan 9.
I read some of the links in the article, and this pessimistic view left me thinking. Pike's point is that (academic) software research no longer matters. We're in a sterile wasteland of Windows, Linux, and the Web. No new ideas are being explored.
Well, that's fine as far as it goes, but a meme that's brewing is the coming dominance of mobile devices and content -- quite different from desktop or server computing.
These points from the article show some possible fields for research:
Only one GUI has ever been seriously tried, and its best ideas date from the 1970s. (In some ways, it's been getting worse; today the screen is covered with confusing little pictures.) Surely there are other possibilities. (Linux's interface isn't even as good as Windows!)
Ties in nicely with this post.
There has been much talk about component architectures but only one true success: Unix pipes. It should be possible to build interactive and distributed applications from piece parts.
Again relevant in the mobile space.
The future is distributed computation, but the language community has done very little to address that possibility.
Who knows? Mobiles are getting more and more powerful. GPS, encryption need processing.
The Web has dominated how systems present and use information: the model is forced interaction; the user must go get it. Let's go back to having the data come to the user instead.
Also very relevant from a user perspective. Data must come to you, when and where you want it, with a minimum of fuss.
Will academia pick up the thrown gauntlet? Lets hope someone does.
Frank and Russell have pointed out some problems with the user interface (UI) on smartphones. Specifically, the Series 60 OS used in most smartphones today.
For the purpose of this post, I define "smartphone" as a mobile phone that has an OS that can accommodate non-trivial extra applications. Examples of smartphones are the Nokia 6600, Siemens SX1 (Series 60), Sony Ericsson P900 (UIQ), Treo 600 (PalmSource), Orange SPV C500 (MS Mobile). "Phone" on this context is a traditional mobile phone. Examples are Sony Ericsson T610, Nokia 6620, Samsung E700.
Phones have some core applications. Central ones are making and taking calls, handling addresses, and messaging (SMS, email, IM protocols). Cameras probably also fall into this category. Less central areas are Web browsing, calendars, etc.
Ideally, all phone functions should be accessible using the keypad one-handed. This means using the thumb of one hand. The Sony Ericsson smartphones use a jog wheel under the index finger of the dominant hand (the right one). Relying on this feature for accessing functions excludes all those who prefer to use their left hand.
An alternative to shoe-horning everything into "thumb-mode" is a two-tiered approach. Basic functions are accesses using a keypad, but an auxiliary keypad or stylus+touchscreen combo is used for more advanced features. But where to draw the line between basic and advanced?
I have had the misfortune to configure email on both a recent Sony Ericsson and a Nokia. Tapping in multiple server names without the benefit of copy and paste sucks. A PC-based app would help here. Another solution is a web interface that sends a SMS with the configuration.
But this begs the question: why do I have to do this? Why can't I buy a phone where the data connections Just Work? Why is MMS and GPRS settings different? Why do I, as a consumer, have to care about whether my phone manufacturer and my service provider has their act together?
Speech recognition holds some promise, but will remain a complement to the keypad.
How about gestural interfaces? I did a bit of research about applications of gestural interfaces in the course of writing my graduate thesis. (For the morbidly interested, you can download it here). An example is scrolling through an image gallery by tilting the phone from side to side. Another is answering a call simply by picking up the phone. My guess is that inertial interfaces will be on par with speech interfaces; a complement to a primary interface which will still be keyboard + screen.
However, the keypad is often woefully underutilised. Usually there's some buttons that are dedicated to navigation, or a joypad. The large 3x5 grid of numerals are used for inputting numbers and text. How about using the '3' and '9' as PageUp and PageDown buttons when browsing sites?
Who will usher in the Mac Age for mobile phones? Not Apple, they can't cover the mobile space (they outsourced the development of the iPod). Maybe Nokia can rise to the challenge. Another contender is Sony Ericsson, with the Japanese half in charge of making lots of tiny devices easy to handle. Another contender is Microsoft, if they're serious about taking the mobile space to the next level, and not just treat it as an adjunct to the desktop space.
I'm feeling unusually stupid right now, and I'm not alone. The fact is that the ventilation in our building sucks. It's a converted turbine hall, very dramatic, but there's no provision for providing fresh air to everyone who works here. Expedients of opening windows simply lead to draughts of Force 10 intensity and a rapid drop of the ambient temperature to Arctic levels.
I need some way to backup the ailing windows box upstairs, whihc is
suffering from an advanced form of WinXP palsy. So I grabbed an old
266Mhz box from the closet, installed a bigger disk, downloaded the
sarge iso via Bittorrent and installed Debian for the first time in
2 years.
I'm using OpenBSD for the most part these days, but I couldn't be bothered to find diskettes and boot from them, then install via the network. So I went the easy route and installed Linux instead.
Debian is still hard to understand. In some ways it's more limited
than OpenBSD -- you can't say that your box will get its network
configurations from DHCP if you're not hooked up to a network already,
and the partition program is hard to fathom. The replacement for the
infamous dselect, aptitude, is really just more of the same, but a
bit less counter-intuitive.
But in general, I know my way around Debian well enough to get going. Now I have to decide whether just to copy everything in the "Documents and Settings" subdirectories over via FTP, or to trust the Migration wizard in Windows.
Singularity Sky by Charles Stross.
An entertaining if uneven romp through a universe where nanotech disrupts post-Tsarist colony worlds and where an uploaded civilisation does all it can do to prevent entities from changing the past, thus editing them out of history.
A big part of the book (a bit too long) is a hilarious sendup of the kind of neo-Napolonic space navies as described by David Weber in the Honor Harrington series.
Blood, Tears and Folly: an objective look at World War II by Len Deighton.
I was pleasantly surprised by this book. Deighton's Goodbye Mickey Mouse didn't impress me, but this is a nice "amateur" history of WWII. Contains nice backgrounds to the different conflicts, with and emphasis on the tech aspects of the war.
I've really read too much about the Second World War. The problem is that the war's status (in the US at least) as "the last good war", together with the "Band of Brothers" aesthetics and the multitude of video games set there almost make the whole thing like a comic book. Despite the blood and guts falling out, the war is still like those 50's and 60's comics where heroic Brits and Yanks fight against Krauts and Yaps.