Articles
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Progress
Everything's a computer these days, and with so many of these devices being connected to the Internet it seems that engineers are getting lazier. Being a software engineer myself, I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't become a plumber.
I worked a full day yesterday despite it being a Saturday, mostly performing code deployment and system maintenance. For those of you who work in the industry, you'll know that it basically means sitting around waiting for progress bars. I've returned home and want to decompress from my day of waiting, only to find more progress bars waiting for me!
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3GP to WebM encoding
☹Yesterday I blogged about jumping off the Atomium. In that post, I included a video for you to see, using the relatively new WebM video standard. It took me five hours of piss-farting around to get that video on there.
To save myself some frustration in the future, I thought I'd take some (more) time to note down the eventual combination used to re-encode the video. Maybe it will be useful to you too.
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Blogging the PPC-1 submarine cable
Submarine cables have always fascinated me, initially from the sheer length of some of these cables, or from the sheer number of them, but also from the fact that the concept was commercially proven as long ago as 1850!
Of course, back then the cables were simple copper wires wrapped in gutta-percha (a kind of latex) and couldn't compete with today's fancy multi-strand fibre optic self-healing rings.
Curiously, PIPE have formally opened a blog that follows the installation of their new PPC-1 cable between Guam and Australia, which is set to be quite interesting.
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The cost of mobile data
I've found myself needing access to the Internet from some remote areas, so it made sense to finally “bite the bullet” and give up; After many years of deliberation and procrastination, I recently bought myself a GPRS/EDGE data plan for my mobile phone.
So why would someone like myself — who carries around a Nokia E70 — not have bought into this earlier? Well, it's very simple: The cost of data through a mobile phone is ridiculously high compared with other more conventional broadband Internet connections.
It's not just Internet connectivity that's expensive, but SMS text-messages also seem disproportionately expensive compared with e-mail. A while ago, someone with too much time on their hands went a bit overboard detailing the cost of an SMS but neglected to understand the big picture.
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DVD Overload
I like movies.
I hate cinemas.
I'm a home theatre kind of guy.
While I may not actually have the fantastic home theatre setup now, my DVD collection has grown significantly over the last two years. People around me have taken notice, and it's become a common gift for me, especially since I'm a difficult person to buy presents for.
This collection has grown to the point where it's become somewhat of an addiction: I'm now faced with a queue of DVDs I've bought or been given as gifts that I still haven't watched!
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So, I gave in.
It was one year ago today since I started a little experiment, and that little experiment has since grown into somewhat of an outlet for my thoughts and frustrations. In fact, through the hundred-odd articles of the past year there's been a fair bit of relentless bitterness unleashed upon the masses.
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Spock
Several people have urged me over the past month to look at the a new web service known as Spock. I avoided doing so, partly because I'm sceptical of anything named after Star Trek characters, their little blue man logo reminded me of every horrible Web 2.0 site, but mainly because it sounded like yet another social networking site — another way for “trendy” people to justify their pathetic friendships publicly. These sites seem to be taking over the minds of once rational people as SMS speak once did, like an incurable sexually transmitted fungus that is making everyone itch but nobody is willing to openly talk about how bad the problem is.
Spock however, isn't exactly a social networking site. It looks like one, and acts like one, but it's main goal is to be a search engine for people. To this end, Spock sucks the lives out of existing sites such as LinkedIn, MySpace, FaceBook and other such CamelCased “network” sites, and carefully plucks out information to build personal profiles with complex metadata rather than just a flat index as Google would.
The world just got a little bit smaller… again.
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Rediscovering old adventure games
My family lived in Hobart for the first three years of the 1990s. It was there that I met Nick, who is ultimately to blame for my addiction to adventure games. Nick encouraged me to try Space Quest Ⅰ, and from there we ended up playing stacks of graphical adventure games together.Over the past few months, I've been able to revisit these old and nearly lost gems, with the aid of software emulators such as Nick's NAGI for the old Sierra AGI games, FreeSCI for the early 1990s Sierra SCI games, and finally ScummVM for those brilliant LucasArts games of the last decade.
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The Electric Car
I recently watched “Who Killed the Electric Car?” which offers an interesting perspective on what happened to GM's EV1 — possibly the first practical electric car to appear. By its final generation, the car boasted the lowest drag co-efficient of any production car in history, clocked a top speed of nearly 130km/h (but was in reality limited because of gear design), and had a maximum range of 120–250km per full-charge.The EV1 was amazing technology for its time, and not a bad looking car either, but for various reasons GM destroyed the cars and moved on to much more important things like the producing gas guzzling pile of junk known as the Hummer, and joining the Global Climate Coalition to help sway negative Kyoto Protocol sentiment. They had to do something special since they destroyed several tram-ways last century.
So, what happened to the electric car anyway?
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QR Code
People who know me here in Brussels will roll their eyes at this article, possibly within reason. Yes, this is a blog entry about a bloody barcode. Yes, I work for a company that works in the AIDC industry. No, however, this wasn't inevitable, and I knew about it a long time ago but tried to avoid fashion: I'm not a fashionable guy, to say the least.As requested by Scott (of Smile in Europe fame), I'm going to temporarily join the Japanese mobile phone fad of adding a QR Code 2D barcode to my blog. There is no way in hell, though, that I'm having it tattooed to my skin!
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Broken blog
Okay, so I broke my blog. Again. I really should stop tinkering when I have no time to fix things I break. If you're reading this, I obviously got it working again.
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'Net-Neutrality and the U-S-of-A
Internet Neutrality is a nasty subject, and something I have strong feelings about. So much so, I support Save the Internet. However, there's something else that really rubs me the wrong way.
I'm referring to the ongoing control of the Internet by the USA. While I understand the yanks have a long history with the network, but the time came many years ago for them to relinquish their grasp over the network and allow it to become more autonomous and internationally unbiased.
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Typorama
I've always been interested in proper typography, especially in combination with internationalisation. Anyone who has worked with me on a project that would involve either will know that I'm particularly anal when it comes to finding and using the most appropriate layout and glyphs for the job.
My favourite examples are often ‘İstanbul’, ‘naïve’, and the difference between a Pound (‘£’, with one bar) and a Lira (‘₤’, with two bars, for which Wikipedia is presently incorrect).
To this end, I once unwisely offered potential flamebait to the Unicode group regarding single and double bar dollar signs. I know that historically the double-bar form depicted strength, but became the single-bar form because of the difficulty in representation using tiny sorts. I also know that Australia prefers a double-bar, New Zealand prefers a single-bar, and the USA don't care anymore as long as they get paid at the end of the day in their own currency.
Despite this, I have been very lax in this regard when it has come to my blogging.
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The pain of web design
It's been a long time since I've done some proper web design, but now I'm working on a mysterious project (long story) that requires me to dive-in once again. Compared to many other people, my design skills are mere tinkering in comparison. At the very least, though, my tinkering isn't as bad as the average MySpace page which is more likely to lock up your computer (it is considered the worst website around by many sources).
Unfortunately life in web design land is still a world of pain and torture.
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Smart appliances using old technology
Recently I've been talking about an article Dave Winer wrote about one of his long-time favourite rants: embedded HTTP servers in devices. Once again, I'm left with the bitter feeling that there's something built into human nature that makes most of us love waste.
Not only physically where we are become an ever-increasing disposable society, throwing away perfectly good things that just need small repairs, but also digitally on the Internet where we are wasting more and more bandwidth and CPU cycles with our bloated, lazy protocols and software designs.
It's time for me to put on my Womble hat and flog the dead horse one more time.
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Is the iPhone ready?
Every man and his dog have been talking about the new iPhone, launched last week by Steve Jobs during his Macworld 2007 key-note speech. No this isn't the Linksys iPhone (that now pales in comparison); this is the long anticipated revolutionary product from Apple, the next in the line since the launch of the iPod in 2001.
This news has also marked the end of Apple Computer Inc. and the start of Apple Inc., a new name for what is no longer a computer company, but a mainstream consumer electronics company. This is possibly the biggest news from Apple, above and beyond the iPhone launch, since it shows a fundamental shift in the company's focus.
I've seen the keynote speech, and read so many articles, and it seems most points of view are partisan, either loving the new device, or hating it disparagingly. I don't feel either views are warranted, so I thought I'd share my thoughts.
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The Optimist's Keyboard?
It's been a long time since the original conception of Artemy Lebedev Studio's Optimus Keyboard, probably the first keyboard that's ever created large waves in the geek community when it was first announced. Now, however, it appears the keyboard has gained itself a bad reputation, and will be a mere shell of its original self.
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The blogging experiment continues
So blogging has lasted a week for me so far - I'm impressed I'm not bored of it yet!
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So, I gave in.
Congratulations. You won, and I hate you for it, vehemently.
I've tryed to avoid you for so many years now, ignoring the constant requests from family and friends, and refuting accusations from colleagues that my life is incomplete without you, I've finally had to give in.
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