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I am an avid reader of xkcd. Recently a cartoon on Movie Narrative Charts appeared. My immediate reaction, of course, was to search the Minuteman Library Network for an available copy of the time trave movie Primer.
My favorite quotes: “Are you hungry? I haven’t eaten since later this afternoon.” and “The best mathematicians are the lazy ones.”
Win and I watched the movie the other night, and I came up with this appreciation, in the style of xkcd:
I’ve tried to stop following the T-mobile / Microsoft Sidekick disaster, in which all customer’s data has been lost, but I can’t. It is an example of schadenfreud.
So far, the word is that Microsoft embarked on a SAN upgrade without an adequate backup, or perhaps without an independent backup. Sidekick devices are thin clients, which keep data only as a cache of the truth, which is on the server.
Thin client is an idea which periodically pops up. The reasoning behind thin client seems to take two forms: thin clients need less hardware, so they are cheaper, and thin clients are easier to centrally manage. These days I suppose there might be a third issue, which is that thin clients are more secure, because they don’t contain your data when you are not there.
The “cheaper” argument really hasn’t made much sense for the last decade. Storage has been following the usual technology curves, and has become incredibly cheap. Processing power as well. It just makes no sense to make the client stupid on the grounds that it saves money. A related argument has been that thin clients are quieter than thick, because they can be made fanless. We now have flash storage that is very low power.
The “centrally managed” argument has a place in the enterprise, in which IT can “provision” a workstation remotely, and employees can “hotel” by taking any available cube. This argument doesn’t seem to apply to mobile devices like laptops or phones, however, because they usually are assigned to one person for an extended period. It definitely doesn’t apply to non-enterprise devices.
The security argument is a red herring, I think, and one that is easily corrected by a decent encrypting filesystem. Yes, a stolen device would be susceptible to offline attacks.
Another issue is availability. We are not always connected, at least those of use that depend on wifi and crappy cell phone networks.
I think that techn0logy trends and connectivity argue for local data. I want copies in the cloud, as backup, and available for computations out there, but I want local access as well.
My personal digital footprint now hovers around a Terabyte, and is only that large because I’ve been gathering digital copies of home video. I have, I think, about 4 copies. I can’t keep it all inside the laptop or iPhone yet, but I can keep all my historical email, all software I’ve ever worked on, all music I own, and all photos I own with me at all times. I also have 10 or 20 gigabytes of public domain books, just in case I need something to read.
In a few years, all that will fit in my phone, and a few years after that, I can have the video as well. Vernor Vinge got this right in his Marooned in Realtime, with a “pocket database” that could hold one’s digital footprint, plus plenty of reference material.
I think there is also an argument that the Sidekick architecture failed to adapt to technology trends. Thin client might have made sense when Danger was starting, back in ought-two or whatever, but it doesn’t make sense now, with multi-gigabyte flash chips nearly free.
I have a Trendnet print server between the LAN and an HP1320 USB printer. The printserver speaks LPR, among other things, and I set up Cathy’s Vista laptop to print via an LPR port to 192.168.166.7, queue HP1320, and it worked fine.
After a rework of the network infrastructure, the printserver moved to .167.39, and acquired a DNS name on the internal network of studyprint.stewart.org.
To make printing work again on the Vista laptop, I created a new LPR port to studyprint.stewart.org queue HP1320 and all was well.
Yesterday the laptop stopped printing. Jobs were queuing locally. From a command prompt window, I could ping 192.168.167.39, but I could not ping studyprint.stewart.org. Aha! DNS problems. However Firefox and IE worked normally for names outside the LAN.
I tried nslookup, and it works fine. studyprint.stewart.org resolves, as it should, to 192.168.167.39.
Then I discovered that I could ping “studyprint” but NOT “studyprint.stewart.org. I presume because the DHCP server told it the default domain was stewart.org. There is really no excuse that the fully qualified name doesn’t work.
At this point, I remembered that Vista is not my fault, and hardwired the printer port to 192.168.167.39. Printing works again.
Dear Microsoft. How is it that you cannot make DNS lookups work reliably? How is it that nslookup works fine but ping does not? It is really too bad that C has some sort of Mac allergy.
Did I mention that the Trendnet printserver speaks Bonjour?
I think it is supposed to speak windows networking as well, but I’ve never gotten it to work.
Hot water stops itching.
This is not well known, but here are some links:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/394710/how_to_stop_the_itch_of_poison_ivy.html
http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2005/10/18/hot-water-for-itches/
Scratching really doesn’t work. After a few minutes, you want to scratch again, but hot water really does work, for hours.
Evidently, itching is caused by release of histamines from the skin. Hot water causes the skin to release the whole reservoir at once. This causes a truly weird sensation for a few seconds, but after that, the area won’t itch for quite a while – hours – until the histamines build up again.
The water has to be rather hot – not full on hot (140 at my house) but hotter than feels comfortable. Experiment. You will be a happy and itch free person.
I use this technique with poison ivy or mosquito bites.
Overall I am very pleased with the iPhone 3G after a year. Like everyone else, I detest ATT.
There are things that could be improved.
UNDO! In the mail application, I sometimes accidentally delete a message. I notice right away, but it is a pain to recover. My several mail apps use different naming schemes for deleted messages. I sure I could fix that, but right now I have to check each of the Trash/Deleted Messages folders to locate the one the iPhone uses. Then I have to scan down the list of deleted messages because the table of contents is kept sorted. I delete so much spam that there can easily be dozens of spams ahead of the message I want. Once I find it, I have to refile it back to the inbox. All thus could be fixed with one undo button.
MARKING – It is a common event that I scan arriving mail while on the go. The iPhone keyboard is not so wonderful that I respond that way. Instead, I’d like to mark the messages I want to deal with later. I could refile them to a todo folder, but I’d rather mark or flag them in the inbox. I’m not much for sorting email into folders. I just create a sequentially numbered archive folder with a few thousand old messages every few months. I’ve been doing this since 1978, so it is kind of set.
The iPhone could use the edit dialog for this. All it does is let you mark mail for deletion right now. Instead, you could flag messages with the edit dialog. To flag a single message, you might swipe it to the left.
Other iPhone apps. I use Google reader on the iPhone. Whevener my daughter borrows the phone, she logs into her account on Google reader. When I get the phone back I have to retype my own login data. The Google reader app could make it easier to select from multiple sets of credentials. Or maybe the whole phone could have a switcher so multiple people could easily share it.
The iPhone needs a way to turn off all phone functionality while leaving WiFi running. This is for airplanes with WiFi.
UPDATE Sept 12.
I forgot the most important improvement to Google Reader. “Mark all items as read” should also return to the feeds view, rather than staying on the particular feed looking at an empty screen. My feed reading style is to scan the entries, reading the ones that look interesting, then “Mark all as read” and move on. I always have to click again to return to the feed list.
I spent the first week or so of my freedom working on the chicken coop. It probably came out over engineered.
There are several public photo albums of the project on my facebook account: Coop Construction is the main one about the coop.
Here’s a photo, but see the album for many more.
I now have time to work on the chicken coop.
SiCortex wasn’t able to find financing in the current climate, and is shut down pending an asset sale. See, for example, http://www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2009/05/28/28gigaom-on-the-block-sicortexs-delorean-style-green-super-23152.html
I haven’t written much here about the company or the technology, but I will do some more of that, because in the five years I spent working at SiCortex I learned a lot, and some of those things will be valuable to others somewhere down the line.
I follow the news of web 2.0 incubators, and the ease and low overhead of software startups, and you know, I am not impressed. SiCortex didn’t fail for lack of technology, or vision, or customers, but from the poor timing of having to raise money during a recession. I loved what we were doing. It wasn’t easy but we did it. We started with a pile of sand, and some ones and zeros, and built the most energy efficient high performance computers ever.
I know it is trite, but JFK pretty well nailed the concept of working on things that are worth doing.
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
Best wishes to all my colleagues.
Today I am at the Marriott Courtyard near BWI. They have free wifi. Actually it isn’t bad. Go Marriott. Unfortunately it is still screwed up in three ways:
May I rant? Showing customers the stack trace of your broken application is Not Good. And Microsoft! Thank you for advertising that your “.net” is so helpful. I’ll be sure to not select .net for my next web project.
Important safety tip! Do not try to bicycle on ice. It doesn’t annoy the ice, but it doesn’t work, either.
Another tip! If the road is wet on a North facing slope, and it is 39 degrees, there’s a good chance there is ice underneath.
And another! If you notice ice on the puddles in the gutters, there might be more ahead.
I had my first wipeout this morning, on the hill from Sudbury north into Maynard, on 27. I think I scared the driver behind me. One second everything is fine and the next, with no apparent transition, the bike and I are sliding sideways down the road. No harm done, but I will be more vigilant!
As I was planning this post, I thought I would check the fine print in the End User License Agreement for Microsoft Office Home and Student 2004 for the Mac.
I can’t find it.
The Microsoft website does have the license for the Windows version of Home and Student 2007, but only as a self-extracting EXE file. (A) I don’t have a way to read that, since my XP won’t run under VMware and (B) Office on the Mac says to load the original CD to see the license. Well the CD is at home.
For such a lawyer-crazed company as Microsoft, they sure make it hard to find out what their rules are. I guess that is deliberate.
Anyway, AFAIK, I can’t use Home and Student for work related things. Consequently, last week when I gave a talk at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, I used Keynote.
