Archive for the 'ideas' Category

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Apple make sportscars

Published on April 5, 2007 in ideas, technical and whine. 5 Comments

A sports-car is something which a lot of people aspire to, but which most people would never buy; spending that kind of money on something which is at least 50% image, and which one would never really use to its full potential (unless one were a racing driver with access to a suitable track) just seems like an extraordinary folly.

But!… says the pleading inner voice, but they’re soooo pretty, and this one goes so fast it boggles the mind! It makes these fabulous sounds, and it imparts such a sense of power…

For those of us who lust less after fast cars, however, there is a precisely equivalent nemesis: Apple. Always they seem to be the coolest, the fastest, the prettiest, and, unfortunately, the most expensive. Even now… *sigh*.

Making people

Published on February 19, 2007 in food, ideas and philosophy. 2 Comments

No, not cloning, not Frankenstein, no virtual avatars, no advanced robotics or AI. Not just procreation, either. Parenting.
This is an odd topic for me to write on, being as I am, not a parent.

Oh, I can claim a little experience here and there participating in the parenting of other people’s children. Most people can: parenting is hard work, and anyone who can bear it will probably get roped in as stand-in laborers at some stage in their lives. I can also claim the same naive expertise that leads nearly everyone to feel that they can make expert commentary on teaching: I have been a child.

So why am I writing about this? Are we thinking about it, you ask? Of course we are: everyone thinks about the idea of being a parent from time to time, even people whose avowed plan is never to do so. That we might be thinking about it is no indication of anything, and if it was, do you think I’d announce it on my blog?!?

I’m thinking, and writing, about parenting right at this moment because I just read a neat article in The Age about cooking with bones (and fat, and skin, and stuff) which repeatedly raised the concern that knowledge of basic home-cooking might be dying off in today’s children, failing to be handed down. This subject is not new to me, as anyone who’s met my father would know. His cooking skill and knowledge is unquestionably vast, but his capabilities as a teacher (see, it was relevant!) are lamentably scant, at least when the student is one of his own family. Nonetheless, I count myself a credible cook, and this is due in no small part to having watched and listened and occasionally been taught, in my childhood, by a great chef.

Reading this article gave me pause to think: what if parenting is seen as an art along the lines of the pride of skill of a good tradesman in each piece of his or her best work? i.e. the pride of a parent might also be about the joy of craft, and the knowledge that here is something which will bear testament to one’s commitment, knowledge, experience and passion, long after one is dead. Mind you, I can immediately see the gaping chasm of a problem with this thought: parents don’t get to choose what their children turn into. Yes, I have seen Dead Poets Society. (If you haven’t, buy a box of tissues and go rent it, now).

The thing I’m getting at, I think, is knowledge-poverty. Not information-poverty: that is unlikely to be a problem for any future generation of humans. This article talked about skills like knowing how to make a stock. Sure, you can look this up on the ‘net, but if I hadn’t given you a link, would you have? And now that you have, if you’ve never made a stock before, are you going to learn? Would it be easier if I showed you? How about if I showed you how, repeatedly, and fed you numerous tasty meals based on it?

That kind of labour is synonymous with craft in my mind: you do it over and over again until it’s second nature. Sometimes you get it wrong. Eventually it’s just a technique, like tying your shoes, or reading an analog clock.

Checklist for the ideal PDA

Published on January 8, 2007 in gadget, ideas, technical and whine. 0 Comments

This post is geeky, and it’s all about PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) such as the Palm Pilot, the Zaurus, or the Pocket PC. This will be geeky: non-geeks may get bored.

Right now, PDAs are in a terrible slump.

Once upon a time, a company called 3com came up with this thing called a Palm Pilot (let us not go so far back as the Newton, for I am ignorant of its glory, knowing it only for its failure). The Palm Pilot was cool: it was a tiny little computer you held in the palm of one hand, and you interacted with it by ‘writing’ on it with a stylus. It was intended to be deliberately low-featured and simple, providing the tools you needed to keep track of your schedule, your memos and your address book, plus maybe a few other simple things. This made it (relatively) cheap.

Later, Microsoft, the company we love to hate, came up with their own competing hardware model and operating system for PDAs, fostering the breed of devices now known as Pocket PCs, among many other names.

This, along with the ongoing need for 3com (later Palm inc.) to make money by selling new gadgets, caused a bit of an arms race (pun intentional). These stylus-based PDAs began acquiring new (expensive) features at a terrible rate. Microsoft coped with this by throwing armies of programmers at the new problems arising from these new devices. The scrawny beast that was PalmOS, however, grew shaky in the extreme at the prospect of things like wireless networking, web-browsing, playing back MP3s while doing everything else, and so forth. Such was the pressure caused by this shakiness that Palm inc. has undergone a long series of personality crises in recent years. These days it is unclear if anyone is really at the helm of the Palm pilot empire anymore, but the fact remains: Palm was cool, and Palm was first. A lot of very cool applications got written for the Palm, and they’re still out there.

Enough history, I miss my point. The point is that this is all fixable. It would not take rocket science to build an ideal PDA today. Here’s how I believe it could be done:

1. Build a new PDA starting with the umpc idea as a template, i.e. use the existing i386-based architecture. Lots of stuff runs on that, and the problems of making it power-efficient like a PDA are already well understood, and largely solved.

2. Put linux on it. Why? Why not? It’s free, and it can be squeezed into embedded platforms just nicely. It has already been done.

3. Give it emulators. This is where I would concentrate the effort if I were a PDA-development firm today: Usefulness is a function of how many good apps there are for your platform. This too, is a wheel that does not require re-invention. If your PDA can run Palm apps, it has a vast library of free tools straight away. Your PDA can do this easily: Palms were slow beasties, and new hardware is very fast. Emulate the PocketPC while you’re at it. If this means embedding a Windows Mobile license, in that particular emulator, so be it. The Pocket PC is a hideous frankenstein’s monster, but the vast majority of modern commercial PDA-apps are being written for it.

4. Don’t be stupid. Right now, at the outset of 2007, the IT industry contains some of the finest minds and the most cunning strategists in the world. Computer hardware and software represent the leading edge in the science of marketing, so why are PDA manufacturers so stupid?

- You need a brand. Palm knew this of old: 95% of the people I know who have ever heard of a PDA refer to all PDAs as “Palms”. Your hardware needs to be in every business magazine on earth, on posters on the side of trams. It needs to have apple-style quirky marketing. It needs to be viral.

- You need a range. The HP/Compaq iPaq range of pocket-PCs might be an example of this, if they weren’t such a higgledy piggledy line-up of nameless one-offs. There is no sequentiality. There is no modularity. Palm today are far worse at this: Seriously guys, three models? One new model every six months or so? And what about back-support? How quickly did the Tungsten T5 become persona non-grata? Why? Oh, and Sharp, wake up and smell the coffee: PDAs do exist in the world outside Japan. If you or someone just siezed the reins, you could expand the existing PDA market by an order of magnitude, and it would all be yours.

- You need a roadmap. Does anyone know? What is the future of PDAs from HP? How about PDAs from Palm? Sharp? It’s not an all-fired mystery: the functionality of a good PDA hasn’t changed all that radically since the Palm 3. Add-ons are how you get your range of similar devices with modular extra features. PC manufacturers can do this in a cyclone with both hands tied behind their backs while whistling dixie. Don’t give me that crap about size being an issue: Mobile phone manufacturers seem to cope, and have you looked at Lenovo‘s line up of laptops lately?

This stuff never fails to astonish me. The PDA market is just so much vastly bigger than the laptop market: only people with desks need laptops. People without desks can still use a PDA just fine. People who have laptops already will spend mind boggling amounts of money to get smaller, lighter ones. Where is the capitalist feeding frenzy? Where is the supply rushing in to fill the demand? What kind of drugs are these people on? Aaaargh!
Manufacturers of the world take note: I am a prototypical english-speaking white male caucasian geek with a good income. My ideal PDA is as follows:

Fits in my pocket.
Uses a stylus.
Runs PalmOS apps.
Runs Pocket PC apps.
Talks bluetooth to my other gadgets.
Is stable as hell.
Will be properly supported by the manufacturer for the next three years.

That’s all. It’s not asking a lot, really. All that other stuff (massive storage, phone features, wifi, cameras, proper web browsers, mp3-playback, nice developer support, keyboards, barcode readers, ruggedness, etc.) would be nice, but I can live without it. I expect that if you have a brain, I should be able to buy these features from you as add-ons or upgrades, or even as more expensive models of the gadget I bought.

Why is it not already so?

The passage of time

Published on January 5, 2007 in ideas, philosophy, whine and work. 0 Comments

Time in an office environment seems to pass in two distinct modes, each of them strangely unlike the manner in which time passes anywhere else:

A) Time screams past in great leaps and bounds. This can be exemplified by the deep-hack-mode effect where one gets so far into a task that the outside world disappears, just after lunch for example, and reappears only when the task is complete, in a dark, silent office at 8:00pm, for example.
This can also happen in an exponential way: the snowballing deadline-crisis, where seemingly brief, simple tasks swell to fill unaccountably large amounts of time, and the working day shrinks incrementally until a very slight lateness becomes a vast and insurmountable slippage.

B) Time opens out like ones sense of space when driving out of a deep canyon into the open desert. The space of time between the present and an hour hence seems like a desolate unending trek to rival Sam and Frodo marching into Mordor. Seemingly solid, satisfying tasks melt like butter on a hot day and slip through ones fingers, either because they are blocked, or because they suddenly become trivial, and are done before you can blink. Tedious, frustrating tasks with no clearly defined goal or conclusion are abundant, but they do not satisfy, nor fulfil. All your favourite time-wasting blogs are mysteriously bereft of new posts for what seems like eternity. RSS feeds trickle to a stop and run dry. Google suddenly only returns places you’ve been before. A feeling of temporal agoraphobia sets in, leaving you feeling stranded and exposed, far from cover and visible to high, wheeling predators. There is nowhere to hide, and 5:00pm is impossibly far away.

It’s times like the latter, much too early on a Friday afternoon, when there’s nothing else left to do but turn to your own blog and blather.

Then, just as you’re about to post your blatherings, for all the world to see, the screen goes blue. Not the familiar blue of the blue-screen-of-death, but an unnerving pale sky-blue. Your computer responds to keystrokes, mouse-clicks, and even jabs at the power button with indifferent beeps. Eventually you manage to shut it down, and then to restart it, cursing all the while at the lost work. Time seems narrow again for a little while: your computer is too slow! It takes too damn long to boot! But then it’s booted, and once again there’s nothing to do but finish that blather.

Someone is trying to tell me something. I just wish I knew what it was…

Five-minute political theory de-jour

Published on January 2, 2007 in ideas and politics. 0 Comments

Reflecting this morning on the war in Iraq and the recent hanging of Saddam Hussein, it strikes me that Bastard Dictators From Hell seem to show up most often in situations where there are plenty of pre-existing tensions, i.e. racial hatred, extremes of poverty and wealth, massive corruption or organized crime so vast and entrenched that it rivals the government in sheer size.

It struck me that this might be a simple extension of the idea put forward in Fahrenheit 911, namely that ever-present fear is a great way of making otherwise rational people elect (and re-elect) conservative assholes, warmongers, and fascists; i.e, whoever most convincingly beats their chest and screams like a silverback.

If your surrounds are filled with the actual threat of imminent war, and people really are doing their best to kill you, burn your homes, rape your daughters and take your land, this kind of stunt is going to be much easier to pull.

I don’t know enough about the background and rise to power of (for example) Saddam Hussein to really make a cogent wrap of this: Did he gain power, even in part, because he made a convincing claim to be able to Keep The Peace(tm)?

Or, as is entirely possible, have I just been over-reading the shiny V for Vendetta comics that E got me for Christmas?

A bleak word picture

Published on December 29, 2006 in ideas, mobile, poetry and whine. 0 Comments

I am a crippled oil tanker, limping through a dark sea leaving behind me a glistening skein of rust flakes, leaked oil, dead fish, poison and revulsion. Likewise overhead an arrow highlights the hapless culprit, pointing across the sky at my lumbering and unsteady bulk, a smear of choking sulphrous carbon, its shadow deep as a starless night.
Why? I choose not to recall.
I struggle onwards, spending all my remaining fuel, destroying myself recklessly in desperation to reach port. It’s as much because I know I’m inexorably losing inches to the sea as any reflex-twitch of half-forgotten duty.
Duty? I prefer not to think about it.
I shake and am deafened by the relentless thunder of my own ill-tuned engines, blinded by the shroud of my own pollution, yet some lingering shred of reason guides me true to my destination.
My Destination? Safe harbour. Nothing else matters.
In the distance, all around me now, converging, others like myself toil, bringing in like cargoes of precious black poison to answer a common need. There are so many, yet I am alone in my own darkness, as they all each are.
Need? No! I DENY IT! Pretend yet that I carry this cargo for no man.
Even my engines now are failing. Their thundrous pitch grows deeper with every passing minute, and a high whining overtone of tortured metal more dominant. I must forego the self preservation of the bilge pumps, turn off my running lights, conserve all power for my final leap to safety.
Safety? They will not let me sink, not yet. They need the oil.
At last now, and all a-sudden there is a light ahead: a shadowed blood-red beacon that guides me in, this final lap, to meet Them there.
To meet who? NO! Avert mine eyes, even now I will not look.
But finally I come to rest, at dock. Eagerly They reach to take my cargo.
At last I can deny it no longer. I turn to face Them, to offer up the ancient riches I have spent myself to bring before Them. I behold the truth that I have long denied.
Before me They stand arrayed along the shore, their serried ranks stretch out to the horizon, dark but for the glitter of their infinite weaponry.
An army.
The army of all that Consumes, gathered here in preparation for the final assault upon the vestiges of beauty, the only remaining truth, the remnant guttering flame of knowledge, the last hope, the last love, the last joy.
All They were waiting for was some fuel.
For this, I have bled and strained and sweated myself dry.
Speechless with dread, self-loathing and despair I watch as They draw forth the oil, and siezing it, take up Their battle-cry: the monotonal drone of absolute indifference.
But even as They go, renewing their inexorable march towards the end of all that was light, I am assaulted anew. An urgent new command comes bellowed down the line, two words delivered in the cadences of unquestionable Authority: More! Now!
And I am cast out.

I am a crippled oil tanker, limping through a dark sea.

—

Footnote: This was mostly written at the end of a very long, difficult day’s work, full of futility and waste as some days inevitably are. I had a blister on my foot and a burgeoning migraine, and I was utterly flat broke. The train was particularly packed with screaming children and mumbling, stinking, belligerent drunks. In short, I was in an especially bad mood. This post should not be taken as significant to my actual life in any way.

Licorettes

Published on December 18, 2006 in food and ideas. 0 Comments

If you’re wondering why I haven’t posted about the long outage and eventual return of Trouble, I have. It’s here.

This is not about that. Nicorette

The Nicorette: An Australian brand of niccotine chewing gum, inhalers and patches designed to help wean smokers off cigarettes.

The Licorette: An Australian brand of licorice-and-menthol-flavoured sugar-free chewy lollies designed to wean eaters off food.

The similarities are more than skin-deep: Both simulate the real thing rather inadequately. Both run the risk of themselves becoming addictive. Both have their own side-effectes, distinct and separate from the side-effects of the things they seek to save you from. Too many of either will make you sick.

Mobile phone quandary

Published on October 20, 2006 in ideas and whine. 4 Comments

At present I am theoretically meant to be carrying two phones with me wherever I go: My original ‘3‘ phone which has my original number on it, and my new Telstra GSM el-cheapo ‘work’ phone. This is a pain… not only are two phones twice as bulky and twice as heavy, they’re also twice as easy to lose, twice as hard to locate and answer when ringing and twice as hard to keep maintained in terms of configuraiton battery charge and address-book data.

This comes at a time when PDA-phones are becoming so sophisticated that I am seriously contemplating replacing my beloved Palm Pilot with a phone.

Why do I want two separate phones?

I want to keep the number-spaces separate: Work calls belong with this job I’m doing now. Private calls will continue to be directed to me for as long as I live, and I want to keep the same number for as long as possible. This is both in terms of what number people call in order to reach me, and in terms of what number I appear to be calling from.
Call costs are separate: Work calls can be paid for by my employer. I don’t want to have to sift them out of my phone bill by hand and then lodge a dubious and slow-moving expense claim. Nor do I want to wind up being ear-bashed over the three hour call to a friend in Zambia I made last month on my work phone. I am happy to pay for my private calls, really.
Phone plan features are separate entities: My Telstra plan has excellent reception. When the phone in question is an on-call phone, this is not so much handy as vital. My Three plan enables E (on a longish Three plan herself) to call me for free, so long as the calls are less than 10 minutes long. It’s also priced better than a Telstra plan, even with my staff discount.

The question is: how do I keep these things while cutting down to only one handset? As far as I’m aware, nobody makes phones which take multiple sim-cards. I’m not sure if it’s possible to put more thn one plan on a single sim-card, but I’ll bet it would (a) void the warranty and (b) only enable the use of one plan at a time.

Call diversion is not an adequate solution. I say ‘in theory’ above because I’m only carrying one handset right now: my z800i. This yields the worst of both worlds:

I pay for all calls, work or otherwise
My work contacts are confused, and can see my private number when I call them
I only get Three-syle bodgy coverage
My phone-books collide

There has to be a better way. If anyone knows of one, or can suggest a guru who might, please tell me!

Time and Perception

Published on October 12, 2006 in ideas and philosophy. 4 Comments

I have this very abstract idea. The analogy is this:

The Sun does not actually move around me, rise and set. Rather it is the
surface I am standing on which revolves.
Time does not actually pass inexorably from the future into the past.
Rather it is the present where I reside which moves.

If I can leave the surface of the earth, why can I not leave the surface
of the present?

Memory is just imagining with some inference: I can see the vague
impression that the past has left on the present. From that I infer both
the past and the future.

To leave the surface of the earth, I must overcome gravity, a force which
is accepted by my animal mind as absolute, but which is really just an
arbitrary vector of limited power and scope.

What force constrains me to the surface of the present? How do I overcome
it?

To overcome gravity even temporarily and fly is an exhilarating experience
which provides new perspectives and greater freedom (and danger) than is
to be found on the ground. To break completely free of gravity and enter
orbit or even move off into deep space is to enter an utterly unfamiliar
world where much that we take for granted is absent or changed. Even
surviving away from the Earth is a fantastically difficult proposition.

What is it like to overcome the force which holds us in the present? Is it
dangerous? What happens if we become completely detached from the present?
Where could we then go? How limited would the perspectives of those mired
in the present then seem?

There is a lot of thought given and material written on the subject of
life on other worlds; whether it exists, what it could/would be like,
whether we can communicate with it, and why we haven’t met any yet, in a
universe which produced us and our world, why isn’t there anyone else?

What about other ‘presents’? If there is a present ‘plane’ to which we are
stuck, why can’t there be more than one? What might we find on other
presents? Should we expect to have heard from other presents?

Trains

Published on September 8, 2006 in ideas. 0 Comments

Over the years I have had a lot of Ideas(tm) about how the existing public transport system could be improved. For anyone who isn’t from Melbourne or one of the handful of other cities around the world which take public transport as seriously, please ignore these ruminations: Melbourne has great public transport, and we have no right to complain.

I was thinking though… I know a number of people who avoid the Melbroune trains and trams because they don’t like sharing their personal spacewith an unfiltered random slice of humanity. Some of these people have adopted some fairly extreme solutions to the whole getting to/from work thing, many of them expensive.

Methinks: were I such a person, and compelled to drive to work every day, I would now be paying something in the vacinity of $500 per calendar month in fuel, repairs, registration, tolls and parking. That’s a very conservative figure, and I own my car…

Suppose instead, I booked a ‘sleeper’ ticket for the train every morning: my ticket would entitle me to one of the nice comfy individual sleeping compartments on a special carriage of every commuter train. For this privelege I would pay, say, $450 per month. A system built into my phone would estimate my ETA at the station from my movements, book a sleeper on the next train I was likely to make it to, and advise me if I was going to have to wait for a space. The sleeper car would have a whole series of small compartments, somewhere between a TokyoCapsule Hotel external link and and a conventional long-haul sleeping berth in size. Each compartment would require a ‘sleeper ticket’ to open.

The complexity of the cost structure involved boggles my poor mind, but I’m sure someone here has the train-geek/logistics sense to determine if this is feasible.

Even a more conservative option might work: first-class commuter tickets and carriages: bigger comfier seats with more personal space, and the assurance that your carriage-mates had to pay extra too, for whatever that’s worth.

We will need to get more of these people on the trains in future, what with the steadily climbing price of fuel. It might be a good idea to get the fussy commuters on-side before you go, for example, banning internal combustion engines within the Central Business District. biggrin

Anyhoot. Should probably be working… *grumble*