I liked the article since it gives a great overview of different techniques together with their genesis. Stuff like a PET scanner does not rain down on humanity. Lots of people needed to work hard to realize it. Ideas, Patents and -as it turns out- the Beatles were needed and involved.
I personally found it fascinating how much ample computation power has enabled. Nothing that mattered in the last 40 years would have been conceivable without massive numerical processing. Even 99.999% of computing power is wasted on Facebook and games it is just awesome that we people deviced instruments to compute so cheaply.
It is probably impossible to estimate the impact that technologies like DfMRI will have on our knowledge and picture of ourselves. The microscope changed the world and each of our lives in the most radical ways. Which might only have dawned on people in the 17th century.
Of course the link was found in Wikipedia. After having set up a monthly donation to them and knowing how good it feels now and will do in the future I wonder why I did not do so earlier. Specially learning new things most Wikipedia pages allow a quick overview about the topic. What I personally really love is how detailed yet concise even very specialized topics are being documented. Quiet brilliant.
Last century we bought 3 full size Samsonite Oyster suitcases. Back then you had to put some stickers on them to distinguish them from all the others that people had.
That changed. Now there are all those black soft textile bags on the belt. I never understood why.
Those suitcases are simply amazing. They have traveled ridiculous miles by now. Life is tough if you are luggage. I can not imagine what kind of treatment they have gone through. They always worked.
I was very saddened when he lock broke on one of them. I don’t think I want any other suitcase. Rimowa seems to be en vogue. But I feel that they would not work better and probably look pretty beat up within a couple of months. I also don’t like if my luggage tells the world “Hey - check this out - I have money - stealing here is worth the risk”.
But as it turns out Samsonite did not only make awesome products, their service rocks as well:
I emailed them, asking if I could order a spare lock. They asked for my address and will send me a replacement lock for free.
I love it if things work right. I think this kind of service is truly inspiring.
Yesterday two ’science stories’ ‘broke’: “Neutrinos traveling faster than light” and “Computers can read images out of the brain”. I am borderline clueless on matters of physics, so I leave that one alone. The fMRI mashup by Nishimoto et al is borderline in my view. The presentation of their findings makes it way to easy to drum up headlines like “Brain Imaging Reveals What You’re Watching” or “Scientists Reconstruct Brains’ Visions Into Digital Video ”
Only spending little time with the setup it seems that the experiement pretty much reveals that 5,000 hours of youtube video are so stereotypical that even a fMRI of the v1 can match some patterns back. For a given individual, after hours of learning. To suggest that the video shown on the right as ‘coming out’ of the brain is extremely misleading.
Having two of those studies in one day means nothing of course. But one can go off on a tangent and wonder why - I am sure wonderful - people and scientists drop science in exchange for head lines and eyeball. Maybe it is time to decide over the 2012 budget? And I am sure that given realities of today it is much to get money for “we can go back in time” or “we can film your dreams”.
I have doubts that the Manhattan Project would have a chance today. Rewind to 1940: Some professors had drawn some numbers on chalk board. Up this day only very few
people understood what they were talking about. I certainly have no clue. They had no computer simulated films. They had no precedence. The bomb they were talking about
was by multiple magnitudes bigger than anything that had done before. There was nothing in reality to show for. Just scribblings on a chalkboard. And some common consensus among a few people. One could see this happening if they would have asked to disappear into the desert to do a bit of thinking. But they needed a bit more: Factories bigger than anything else that had been built. And 10% of all electricity in the entire US to run them. To make a handful of matter that -according to science- might make one big boom.
All based on science. And politicians and military people did go with it. And they built different models that both worked after five years.
iTunes just rejected to play a song that I purchased 3 years ago, since it told me I need to authenticate my current computer.
Instead of trying to figure out what is broken with the Apple authentication for that song I just went ahead and bought it again on Amazon. Without CRM.
Apple is notorious for having one of the worst user management systems for their online services. The documentation of my Apple ID changes and resets
spans many pages. There are none for other systems and services that I used equally long.
Funny how one company can be so great in a couple of areas and fail so consistently in others.
On a recent Macbook Pro (i7, Macbook Pro 8.1) post Feb 2011 I did not have much love from a kernel driver. Oddly google was not that helpful.
/var/log/system.log system log complained along the lines of:
[0x0-0x30030].WebToGo.ePlus2_1[1106]:
/System/Library/Extensions/HuaweiDataCardActivateDriver.kext failed to load -
(libkern/kext) requested architecture/executable not found;
check the system/kernel logs for errors or try kextutil(8).
The fix was pretty simple: Just boot the machine into 32bit mode. Turns out the default boot mode is 64bit on later hardware. One way to find out which OS mode you run is to go to:
About this Mac
More Info …
click directly on the Software item on the left.
You will see 64-bit Kernel and Extensions: “Yes” in the second last line.
If you hold the numbers 3 and 2 during boot then you will be in 32bit mode and get probably much more love from 32 bit extension. In my case it was an Aldi Surfstick S4012 based on a Huawei one that caused some grief in 64bit.
Since not many 64 native machines are out there it explains why this topic is not easier to google right now.
A, the good old days, when I had hair (well kinda) and computers were large, big and expensive.
These emulators from Nvidia reminded me of that time back last century.
And they also get to show how much horsepower actually is in a modern day GPU.
Switching machines I realized that I had to re-install webmailer. This wonderful preference plane lets you launch any web based mail program whenever your default mail application would be launched.
I have used it for years. Thousands of times. And it always worked.
And I failed to appreciate that. Going through our lives our attention is where we need to act or avoid. The broken and annoying stuff is what we notice.
All the well working things that surround us go naturally under appreciated. And, since people have piled up allot of technology and culture in the last couple of generations there is actually a huge amount of that.
If a thousand items worked and one does not, that one will be all we think about.
A good summary of what happened to Nokia. Point is that engineers can not run the show. But -of course- all the prettiest design in the world can not safe a project / company if the underlying technology is not up to the task.
If I ever find that engineer that told the users that the way computers worked could be changed I’d kill him. He had it coming. He probably told those proto-users also that it would be complicated etc etc. But he had already lost them. All they remember is that they can change their mind. The how and why they don’t care about. “you can make that work, right”. No more planning. No more thought. Just charge ahead wherever your mind and dreams might guide you.
All goes to hell, since nobody thought about anything? No big deal. Can be changed. It’s easy, right?
Next profession I choose involves a chisel, a hammer and preferably rocks. Also handy to have something to throw on the floor at all times.
I am looking forward to see what artists will come up with in the future in respect to public sculptures: Since the people controlling funds for these concepts have not exactly been bestowed with imagination it is great to see that more contemporary concepts are a reality.
Nielsen numbers suggest that about one third of HD TV sets actually display HD. I wonder how many sets are still set to the store default mode: It is set as bright and vibrant as possible to make the units “look good”. But it kills the picture.
It is a tragedy: Back in the day of analog TVs it was allot of work and engineering needed to get that electron beam create a pretty and truthful picture. Today it would be easy. The whole pipeline is digital. A majority of households could enjoy unprecedented image quality. LCD and Plasma panels are impressively stable and predictable. But -no surprise there- people don’t care enough. Neither do the makers of the sets.
In a better world the sets could inform viewers about the input resolution. They could ship with a little set up tutorial (all acted out, and understandable) playing from a couple MB of memory somewhere in the set. The store mode would mention that it is active during power up. Remote controls would make sense. A Bluray player would come with a demo / promo / set up Disc that shows how wonderful the format can be. What you can do with it, and why Samsung,Sony,LG,insert-maker-name-here is awesome.
While holding the Home button, press and release the Lock Sleep/Wake button. Your screen will flash letting you know that the screen shot was taken.
I had no idea that it was that easy to take a screen shot on the iPhone. The way this works is just perfect. It is easy to remember since it references the ‘you push the button we do the rest’ habit of taking a picture. It works and gives proper feedback. Sometimes Apple gets it right. Sometimes they manage to get beyond the thinking of engineering and make things really work. Technology companies get often stuck on the technology level. Nice to see when it gets transcended occasionally.
I like this graph. It is a wonderful example how a theory can be conveyed.
I have trouble following the underlying assumptions though. Plotting the potential output as a straight line going up is a nice illusion. Last time I checked things don’t automatically get better. Thanks to entropy the opposite is true. It takes a certain effort to maintain the status quo and even more energy is needed to improve matters. The past certainly saw advancements in GDP. Over and over again. But assuming that this will therefor continue is equally foolish as to predict the future reign of the Pharaohs in Egypt just because they did so in the last thousands of years.
The Dow is climbing, but unemployment does not decline. It might be that a conventional analysis is under estimating the impact of structural changes that happened in the last two decades. A tempting simplification of what is going on could look like this: Progress in computers and communication technology is creating huge values without creating the jobs as it was usual in previous eras. Facebook employs one engineer per 1.2 Million users.
Quantum leaps in efficiency ( workers vs output ) did happen before. But never as radical and rapid as seems now to be the case. Since this is unprecedented nobody has the faintest idea what this actually means.
For a couple of years the housing bubble masked the effects of this technological revolution on the job market. But eventually we will have to cope with the fact that nobody needs to file TPS reports any longer. That’s done by some computer somewhere.
I don’t think that it would be appropriate to go into detail here why INTERDUBS uses a different storage solution. Or why I think that such details do not matter for the clients, as long their data is 100% protected. Isilon works, I would not exactly title it meaner and leaner myself, but people can feel about what they do in any way they want and express it accordingly. Would not be worth the blog entry.
The question that is worth being raised is how Wiredrive using Isilon is newsworhty at all. This Wiredrive document outlines how Isilon is in use. While it itself is not dated it references the 2006 Olympics and 250GB hard drives.
Bringing decommissioned hardware from the data center in the office in order to break it down. Turning the machines on it is amazing what kind of stench gets emitted from the machines. Not the disaster forbearing smell of burnt wire. Just that pure ‘cheap electronic factory’ odor.
The Cisco / Linksys srw 2024 is not really a bad switch. What is really sad that the web interface will only work in IE7 or before. It will fail in any modern browser. There is nothing fancy about a web interface for a network switch. No need to use anything IE specific at all. No need to seemingly do it in a way that IE8 simply stops working. I think Cisco should either stop selling the device, update it, or at the very least put a note in the box that it requires IE7 or below to operate. If they would care that is.
In the pre Internet age dentists with a literary ambition not no corresponding talent could ‘publish’ the book themselves. They dropped a nice amount of cash on a couple of palette of dead trees. Now, in the digital age they just can blog, tweet, update their facebook page. The googlebot might care.
Social media always has been a Ponzi scheme. Much like you run out of fresh suckers in the money ‘making’ enterprises you run out of audience. The difference is that the internet is able to give you the illusion of an audience. It seem that things are working. Everybody in the world COULD find that tweet you just made that is so brilliant.
People and companies alike often fail to look clearly at the actual effort and time that they put into the creation of the content and put it into relation of the size of the actual audience. Luckily failed virals have the built in effect that nobody notices them. But they still exist, and so do millions of tweets that nobody cares about.
The signal to noise ratio of the overall Internet keeps collapsing. People complained about the “Summer of AOL” last century. It is a blessing that we had no idea what was coming our way …
Bill Joy wrote allot of software. Allot of what he wrote in the 70s is still in use. Of course not bit by bit. Not even much of his original source code might be left. But -whether you know it or not- BSD Unix, nfs and vi make your life better. Every day. Before his generation computer code was entered via punch cards. Access was very limited. Even on the terminals that Bill used people had to account for the time they used. But:
So the computers of the time at Michigan, you were charged like $3 an hour. It was
interactive, which was cool. It wasn’t just punch cards, but you were charged like $3 an
hour to be on, and you were charged for CPU time, disk IO’s. Every little thing the
computer did, it would keep counts and charge you. So the Anthropology Department
had an account with several thousand dollars so we could get some reasonable computer
time. And we figured out how to get free time very quickly. There was a bug in the
system where you could tell it when you logged in, you’d say you wanted time, and time
equals seven seconds, or time equals five minutes, some limit. You’d sign up for a block
of time. You’d say T equals K, which was not a number, but that would give you free
time, and then we had as much time as we wanted until they plugged that loophole, which
took several years.
I am sure that they would have found a different way to get the time they needed. Sometimes
gaming the system is a good thing. But certainly not as often as people think. The spirit of Enron is still out there.
In order to operate the ZTE K3565-Z under OS X 10.5 or 10.6 you need to set the
network preference settings yourself. The Software defaults are wrong and will not work.
Vodafone phone support refers to debitel for this product. Debitel charges $1.55 a minute for support.
The bigger problem is that they don’t support OS X. They just say that they don’t know anything about it.
In the end things got working with these settings collected from the Internet and applied with a bit of luck:
When you insert the USB stick you get a volume with
Vodafone MC Installer
I ran this. I think it is needed. Also since its distinct crappyness will give you a taste of things to come. After you installed this the volume will no longer be mounted when the stick is being inserted.
Under 10.6 I got lots of messages about extensions not being working / being compatible. Both after the install and after the reboot this POS installer felt it needed.
Vodafone Mobile Connect.
should launch after the install. It fails the first time under OS X 10.6, complaining that it can not find a the stick. Just start it again.
The Vodafone Mobile Connect junk-app is good for one thing only: it lets you enter the PIN of the stick. The “Activate” / “Aktivieren” button is actually plain evil:
it will overwrite the network preference settings for the K3565-Z with non working defaults. Don’t click it.
Since we are talking crapware here the Network control panels gets populated with three devices for the ZTE stick. You can ignore / remove the ones ending in ATPort and DiagPort.
One should read “Vodafo…565-Z”. The number is *99***1#. That’s ok.
In order to make the ‘Connect’ / ‘Verbinden’ button sing for you have to change settings under ‘Advanced …’ / ‘Weitere Optionen …’.
In the Modem tab choose for the
‘vendor’ / ‘Hersteller’ the setting ‘Generic’ / ‘Allgemein’
then for the
model pick “GPRS (GSM/3) ”
for the
APN: event.vodafone.de
just like your Grandma always told you. Make sure to hit “Apply” / “Aendern” before you try to connect. If you “activate” the card with the mobile connect crapware then your settings will be overwritten.
When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because
that’s what you needed on the farms.” Cars became more popular
s cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic
transmission became popular.
“PCs are going to be like trucks,” Jobs said.
“They are still going to be around.” However, he said,
only “one out of x people will need them.”
I agree on the part that iPad like devices will liberate
people from using computers that didn’t want them in
the first place. And there are more than we think.
I think Apple will make a killing by recognizing this with
the iPad.
I like the historical analogy. However I find this one
to be more fitting: Computers are like kitchens, and
iPads are like micro wave ovens. A microwave will
work against your hunger. You are dependent on
pre made things that you have to purchase at a price.
It is easy, but you have not much chance to control
the experience.
A kitchen is more complex to operate than a microwave.
But the food tastes better. It is healthier and cheaper.
And the varieties of experiences is endless.
An Apple TV box stopped reacting to the IR when being back in the Apple interface. The light was still changing colors when a button was pressed, but nothing happened. This forum post describes perfectly shows how to get the IR working again. Since it would be a shame if these clear and wonderful instructions would fall prey to data rot here a (slightly amended) copy of them:
1) if you have not already, patchstick the ATV
2) ssh to the atv
(Steps 3 and 4 will fail if you have set the ATV to not auto update its software, since mesu.apple.com will resolve to 127.0.0.1)
3) download the IR firmware update utility: wget http://mesu.apple.com/data/IR/061-3045.20080708.Aq12D/IRReceiverUpdaterTool2
4) download the firmware image: wget http://mesu.apple.com/data/IR/694-5586.20081119.2AvT3/irrxfw-0×0312.irrxfw
(you probably will need to do chmod +x IRReceiverUpdaterTool2)
5) run the firmware patch: ./IRReceiverUpdaterTool2 irrxfw-0×0312.irrxfw
6) if the process worked you should see this message near the end of the output:
At his point the IR indicator blinks yellow. The Apple UI is reacting again. With
an ATV software Version 3.0.2 on a Geforce Go 7300 1GHz ATV the IR became
inoperable after a reboot.
Redoing the update, then unpairing the remote and pairing it again fixed this.
On a side note: I found this blog post 20 minutes after I made it when googling for ‘IRReceiverUpdaterTool2′.
Apple published a “Thoughts on Flash”. The piece is amazingly well crafted and written. The real reason for Apples bold move attempting to keep flash out of the mobile space only shines through. If Flash would become the engine for mobile, then applications could run on Apple and other devices. A mobile software eco system would grow outside of the Apple space.
Apple realizes the potential of preventing this. Out of the box the iPad can NOT do any of the following:
= perform as a calculator
= perform as an alarm clock
= read PDFs
Yes, I am sure, ‘there is an app for that’. Which is the model of the device. And in order to create software for this you have to adhere to Apples programming standards (objective C) and use their distribution channels. They are in control. Letting flash grow in this space would not allow them to control this.
For Apple this makes perfect sense. And it is amazing that they had vision that they would be able to dethrone a system that always could claim greater than ninety percent proliferation.
I remember that early DVDs would start into the movie right away. and then, when done would go to the menu. When you insert a DVD you do it, since you want to see the movie. Not because you want to watch all the other crud, like a menu opening that contains key elements of the movie to come, often oddly animated.
The problem with this is, that probably not enough people care. They don’t care about spam, viruses on their computer, their diet either. In turn the quality of the offerings for ‘the general public’ get worse. To the point that they are plain junk in some cases. I read that ‘30 rock’ would be a good show. When I watched some of the first season the other day I was a bit shocked how little I was able to enjoy it. Probably a unique aversion since I don’t watch TV. So my tolerance for mental junk might be a bit different compared to people who spend hours in front of the TV screen.
Naturally my son wanted his own computer. He is 11 so isn’t it a birth right to have one? I only pointed to a stack of parts, being left overs from some upgrades and told that he could have one if we can put it together himself. He looked and me with this “Dad, I love you, but wtf is wrong with you + and what on earth have I done to deserve to be treated like this” look. He actually said “But I am eleven years old”. My reply was “yes, you are eleven years old”.
After a couple of days he realized that that I was serious about what I had said. Funny, since the previous 11 years might have given him a hint about that one. So he got the parts out. Had a good look at them, connected them in a way that made sense, connected them wrong, cursed, cried (of course not), asked questions and he ended up with:
I gave him a hand to put things in a case and everybody was happy.
But wait, there is the Internet, there is an eleven year old boy. An awesome one. But still!
I have not seen any software that would be able to protect my child from all the rotten stuff that is a couple clicks away on the internet.
The solution that we came up with works better I think. I explained my worries to him. He understood. I asked him if it would be
OK if I would look at where he goes at the net. He had no issues with that. Since Firefox stores visited URLs in sqlite and he
naturally runs an ubuntu machine this was easy to do. Each day that he used his computer I get an email from it that shows me
what he has been up to. He is totally aware of that and does not mind at all. And I never had anything to worry about.
Today was the first time that I saw in the end of such an email:
Which helps me quiet a great deal in what I have to do. Nice to see gmail getting better. With Buzz and Wave being what they are it became en vogue to bash google. It is nice to see that they continue to add nice features as well.
Since more than 25 years I write computer programs. Writing some information to a file for later use is a very common thing. It worked (most of the time). But it never felt right. Common up with a format, creating a writer and a parser. All that can be done. Rather mundane. Finally I switched to using sqlite for this kind of thing. And this feel right. It works. And will just cover 99% of all cases were I have used “fopen” in the past. One of the things that I like about coding for a living is that it keeps getting better. Not me, that’s for sure, but the tools. And that almost makes up for the natural decline in raw brain power.
In the right hands you can make some very compelling images with a camera body that retails around 2.700 $US.
I had hopes that miniDV would spawn new content, due to the leap in quality of the recording technology. It didn’t work out that way.
I am hoping again that the 5D Mark II and similar devices do that.
At least wedding videos will look better than they used to.
