Memories of Dreams

A few events recently have sparked memories of dreams I once had. Playing with Wolfram Alpha and seeing its error message “I am sorry Dave i’m afraid I can’t do that” indicating somewhat to its creators inspiration. My own inspirations and aspirations in entering the world of IT were very much the same. From the early attempts at simple conversational programs, programs that could play noughts and crosses and experimentations with Eliza it seemed like a small step to develop general purpose intelligence in computers if we just had a little more power. Prolog was a new hope at one stage. You could define the rules and the intelligence would work out how to solve the problem. Somehow it never seemed to get where we all hoped. We have computers now that will fit in a pocket with orders of magnitude more power than those that ran Eliza yet Wolfram Alpha seems to fall a little short of my inflated expectations.

I think the flaw is in our understanding of how we work, how our general intelligence solves problems. In Prolog all axioms needed to be specified, it is a closed world reasoning system. If it doesn’t know something then the answer is false. The human mind on the other hand is a generalising intelligence, as opposed to a generalised reasoning system. We can only reason about a limited set of things so we generalise our experiences and knowledge to fit those limited set of things and then reason about them. This is not a fool proof mechanism for interacting with the world but it is computationally efficient. Thinking back to the initial dreams of perhaps implementing HAL the key is in the name, HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer) heuristics being simple rules of thumb that will get you an answer, not necessarily the right one but an answer and quickly.

Perhaps this is one of those projects which will make if off my “Someday Maybe” list eventually.

Mediated Reality.

I have had the good fortune to be able to attend a few good concerts at local arenas over the last month and have thoroughly enjoyed being there and experiencing some great acts live on stage. I have seen them both on the small screen much earlier in my life and the when the chances to see them live came up months ago tickets were hastily bought on-line and the dates were anticipated weeks in advance. For me the time I am there at the concert I like to lose myself in the performance and try to take in as much of the experience as possible.

It was just during a long and indulgent Clapton Guitar solo that I first noticed the strange sea of lights below me. (I happened to have a sub-prime seat at the Echo arena for this one so I could see the floor seating from quite a height). Almost all of the floor seating looked as if the crowd were holding lights above their heads, reminiscent of concerts of an earlier generation where lighters were held aloft and swayed in time to the music. These lights were not moving however but remained fixed on the stage unmoving. The lights were, as you may have guessed, the LCD screens of multitudes of mobile phones, their users attempting to capture the intricacies of the performance before them. At the time I thought it was some how strange but perhaps understandable to preserve the experience to remember later and share with friends (either at the pub or more likely via MMS).

It wasn’t until the last concert, where I had significantly better seats on the floor, that I had the opportunity to study the phenomenon a little more closely. This time the visual feast of Jean Michel Jarres laser light show was far more impressive, filling the field of view and the music immersing you in the experience and sure enough there were hoards of people with their phones trained on the stage attempting to preserve the spectacle on solid state memory. I took a few pictures of particularly amazing sights and my partner took a few pictures and a couple of short video shots but some people seemed to be consuming the concert entirely through their three inch LCD screens. Eyes barely wavering from the screen to ensure it remained focused on the action but somehow to me almost entirely missing the point of actually being there to experience the event.

As a general rule the people that exhibited this behaviour were the much younger section of the audience. Is this a trend that is indicative of a wider malaise, people so wrapped up in digitising their life and interacting with reality though technology that they are no longer content to simply be there in the moment. I can’t really comment on whether the youtube generation I witnessed actually enjoyed the concert as much as I had despite their concentration on the small screen but my gut feeling is that they can’t have done.

Perhaps, now that they have recorded it a more persistent form than my neurons, their memories will last longer as they can re-ignite them at will by re-playing the video on the phone or PC. I still feel that there is an emotional connection from being in the present, with the whole of your self, that is being missed continually by an ever increasing proportion of our population.

Moral Dilemma

I have a huge back catalogue of tapes of music I used to listen to a lot when I was younger, both at school and at University. My recent attendance of a Jean Michel Jarre concert prompted my to want to listen to the old albums again, some of which I only have on tape. Unfortunately with the 100% digital household the re-playing of analogue tapes is not really possible unless I use one of the kids CD/Radio/Cassette players. It would be incredibly easy to just pop on to Pirate Bay, or whatever has replaced it since the court case the other month, and download a nice MP3 version to listen too anywhere in the house or on my MP3 player.

This is where the moral dilemma comes in, I own the tape, I could probably find it in about half an hour digging in the garage but I can’t really make good use of it any more (hence why they are all in the garage). As such it it actually a violation of copyright to own a copied version of the MP3s. I could feasibly create the MP3 copies for personal use with the right equipment (I think I own a 3.5mm connector to play the tape into the computer and hack it up into tracks and MP3 encode them). I don’t really see why I should pay to own it again on CD ( I think I paid about ten quid for it first time round which felt like a lot of money back then), but then if I had lost the tape I wouldn’ t be entitled to a free replacement. It is making use of a freely distributed copy of the CD with no royalties being paid to the artist and in some cases I have bought CDs of things I have on tape because I have found them in discount bins at HMV in order to have a proper digital copy.

I don’t really mind paying for music on the right medium, but not at extortionate cost. I think it would be a great idea to have a trade-in option where you could take your old tapes and get CD versions for something like three pound perhaps up to a fiver which is about what I have been happy to pay in the bargain bins to upgrade some albums.

As this option does not exist though the dilemma still stands is is morally (if not legally) acceptable to download an MP3 file of music you have already paid for legitimately in one form or another?

Experiments in Organisation

I always seem to be coming back to the issue of not having enough time to do the things that I want to do. I used to read books, write more code, generally I felt more creative too. These days I am lucky if I read a book a year and coding outside of work is non-existent despite many small projects which really excite me being queued up on the computer almost ready to go.

So I stopped and looked at what I was doing and found that I was reading but it was mostly on-line and not always that useful or even interesting. I was spending upwards of two hours a day reading little bits of random information from various sites around the net. Fortunately one of those sites was LifeHacker which has some interesting hints and info on being organised. I have been half reading a book on a similar topic (Why am I so disorganised? by Dr Maryliyn Paul) but as mentioned earlier never seem to have the time to read it properly.

Two points really stuck out as things that I could try and do. The first was to go off-line to try and get things done (Know When You Should Unplug from the Internet) and the second was that sometimes simple pen and paper lists can be more effective than electronic PDAs which I have tried and failed with for years. (Hipster PDA Articles)

I have now started to carry a small selection of 3×5 cards with some selected templates from DIYPlanner.com in an index card based leather note jotter from Staples. I also picked up an index box and some dividers while I was there to try and keep things in some form of order once I have written them down. The always available nature of pen and paper/card has already lent it’s self well to noting down ideas and thoughts I have had and things that I would probably have just forgotten have found their way onto a to-do list. Progressing through hand written to-do lists seems to be much more satisfying than just doing a job, so much so that if I find I have completed something that wasn’t on the list then I add it and immediately tick it off.

I am maintaining about three lists at the moment which are, work tasks, house tasks and incubation ideas. This is all loosely based on what I have gleaned about David Allens Getting Things Done which I will confess now to not knowing enough about (it is on my incubation list to find out more and re-read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People while I am at it).

So far though the system is light weight enough for me to manage but effective enough to be noticeable so I am a little wary of complicating things too much until I am into the routine a bit more. There are a few more templates I think I need to try to keep track of some of the larger projects when I finally get them started such as the Project Task/Objectives template. Overall I like the compact nature of the solution as I can carry around what I need in my coat pocket and the speed at which I can just jot things down or refer back to things seems much faster then the other PDAs I have tried.

Aspire One, One week on

Well I have had the Aspire One for a week now and the NetBook Remix is serving me well. I have added a few things to make life a little easier. The first and the one I am using right now is Drivel which is a great way to generate Blog entries off-line and then post them when completed. I have played with it before on the full laptop but for some reason I never really used it extensively as most of the time the laptop was connected to the net and I could post directly or I was using wordpy on the N800. The WordPress interface is a little un-responsive on the NetBook though so I think Drivel will see a bit more action.

The second useful addition is Unison which represents a massive improvement on my previous mobile backup regime of grsync by being truly bi-directional (actually in its current configuration it is tri-directional). GRSync has been great to ensure any content on my laptop or N800 has been backed up to the Linkstation but with the NetBook I wanted to be able to freely switch from working on the NetBook to working on the full size laptop so I started looking for bi-directional synchronisation. Unison makes use of the same SSH key-pairing I have used for setting up rsync so there was no major pain there. I have installed the GTK Unison package that is available from the Ubuntu repositories and I had to find a mipsel debian package to crowbar into the Linkstation. The GTK Unison package does an initial scan to determine what changes to make and presents a very easy interface to determine what needs to be synced and allow you to manually resolve conflicts.

The final solution now revolves around both the NetBook and the main Laptop synchronising with a directory on the Linkstation on-demand. All that is needed to get things onto the NetBook is to copy it into the Mobile folder and run Unison the run Unison again from the NetBook. It could all have been accomplished by SVN or CVS but I don’t really care about version control for this sort of thing (I do have a CVS server for code and web sites I maintain) and the GUI interface just makes the whole solution very easy to keep using which is 90% of the problem keeping things backed up.

New Toy

I have decided to resurrect my blog, partly due to the acquisition of a new toy, and partly to try and get back to writing some more interesting entries.

Firstly on to my new toy, it’s an Acer Aspire One. Just the 8.9 inch SD powered one that initially came with the Linpus Linux distribution. As a piece of hardware the device is very compact, feels very solid and is actually surprisingly easy to type on (when I don’t tap the touch pad). I read many reviews before deciding which one, of the ever growing stream of Netbooks, to buy and it came down to the Acer or the Dell, predominantly due to the keyboard. A recent round of price drops was the clincher though as the Acer came in at £165 in the end which is almost half the price that I found the Dell at. It’s even cheaper than the Asus EeePC 701s that I bought for the kids about 18 months ago which I found just a bit too small for my fingers but the kids are very happy with.

Linpus was very easy  to use and very quick but little niggles like the keyboard mapping in xterm and the outdated versions of Open Office and Firefox annoyed me a little too much. As a result I ended up installing the Ubuntu NetBook Re-Mix within two days of purchase. Having used it for a couple of days now it is definitely here to stay. Everything worked straight from the install (apart from hot-plug detection of SD cards if one isn’t inserted on boot which has a workaround of an additional boot option to the grub menu BUG). All te software versions, unsurprisingly, match the full Ubuntu install on my main laptop so I should have no worries about document interchange. So far I have even stuck with the Re-Mixed interface as it really does make it easier to use on the small screen.

On the negative side there has been some loss of speed compared to the Linpus installation but I think that is partly a consequence of the updated software stack. The boot option to fix the SD card issue also makes the start-up look messy and  takes longer which is a minor annoyance (which I hope will be fixed sometime soon).

The full library of Ubuntu software is also at my disposal now which had been a minor annoyance with Linpus when I tried to add things which conflicted with custom packages from Acer. I will have to try and be more selective than I have been on the main laptop though in order to preserve as much of the 16GB SD for some actual work. So far I have only added pyroom to provide some distraction free editing (after thinking it might be interesting to try from seeing a review of JDarkroom on lifehacker.com). I am sure I will add more as the days wear on but the intention is to try and keep this as clean as possible so that I can actually work on some ideas when time allows and not get distracted.

The future of Digital Broadcast

On reading the various diatribes on DAB on the register over the last few months of which Fixing the UKs DAB disaster | The Register was the most recent one to get me thinking. DAB as a technology is outdated and really hasn’t achieved the market penetration needed to bring digital broadcasting into the mainstream.

I tried DAB a few years ago and was disappointed then by the quality and reliability of the stations I was receiving and very quickly found myself returning to FM. In the intervening years I purchased a Roku Soundbridge with the primary purpose of listening to my growing MP3 collection over some decent speakers in my lounge when I am reading the odd book. The Soundbridge is also a very capable internet radio with 18 preset stations and more available from Radio Roku which are made available via the Sounbridge as My Favorites. So now I have a huge selection of Digital Radio stations available at home and to some extent on the move via my N800 which also has good internet radio capabilities.

There is one problem now for my digital life style now. The one place where digital radio has yet to make an impact and the one place where digital radio can make serious big wins. I spend a long time in my car when I am working and that is the one place I am still at the mercy of FM. Yes I can listen to CDs or I can re-play podcasts via my MP3 player but I can’t listen to my favorite radio stations unless I happen to be in their FM coverage areas. I like Virgin and Smooth FM and have them both on my various devices as internet streams but if I am working in the wrong areas then I am stuck.

I want to have my radio and listen to it where ever I am and that means the 10 or 12 hours a week I am in the car (sometimes more if I have a busy week). I have a phone with data and a data calling plan. I can get a Sat Nav that downloads up to the minute traffic announcements from the Web. I have a hands free kit in the car to make calls that will come out of the car stereo speakers. Why can’t I play my internet radio this way?

3g coverage and higher speed mobile data connections are getting better as the technology finally catches up with the spectrum allocation so expensively purchased by mobile networks. There are still some problems with more rural areas where broadband/3g coverage is still poor but I guess these areas are probably poorly served by DAB too so if we are going to invest money into any form of digital coverage for these areas it makes sense to me to ensure it is IP based coverage in one form or another to provide both digital broadcast and twenty first century network access. The growth of Multicast channels (as mentioned in the above article) should alleviate some of the additional bandwidth costs required by this switch and allow even the most rural of stretches of phone line to get reasonable sound quality.

Even the big radio makers are seeing the market trend with Roberts producing a WiFi Radio player and similar offerings can be seen from other major manufacturers. If I have the right phone then I can get a number of players from Sydus I just need to get an unlimited data plan that will not cost me an arm and a leg.

More UI Customisation

I seem to be just going on about the N800 at the moment but I have been having lots of fun with a whole host of additions since the last OS update. It seems like there is a flurry of activity for a month or so after each update or maybe thats just my perception. I find loads of new things to install after I have re-flashed the OS and the applications backup fails half way through restoring my previous config.

The latest bells and whistles come in the form of Large Statusbar Clock which provides two statusbar applets, one for minutes and one for hours. I tested an earlier version a while ago but it kept forgetting that I like 24 hour clock. The latest version is however much better and allows you to set alarms too. The other one I have added, mainly to make room for the clock, is Advanced Backlight which provides additional backlight settings and master volume control in one applet.

The final extra is Load Applet which gives a nice indicator of CPU and Memory utilization and access to a process list where you can kill off errant processes. It also takes screenshot (either instant or delayed) which is very handy. (hence the obligatory screen shot). (interestingly it doesn’t show in the screenshot below?????).

You will also notice the massively improved personal menu from my earlier post which has come on leaps and bounds in such a very short space of time. The on going discussion on the ITT Forums has really spurred this application on to the point where it would be a travesty not to include it in the next OS version.

Personal Menu

During the mornings boredom browsing I found this most promising little plug-in for OS2008 Personal Menu.

I have only slightly resented the fact that a button was being wasted by a set of applications that I rarely if ever used. Personal Menu allows me to replace this with an easily customisable set of favorite applications. This gives me extra choices, is much easier to add and remove things and re-order than the normal applications menu. It also means I can keep my applications organised by type in the main applications menu which I like.

It looks like the functionality may be coming in a future release of ITOS from one of the posts in the discussion but untill then this is an excellent usability add-on.

Applicatons

I had decided that I would re-flash my N800 today. Mainly because it felt cluttered with things that I don’t use. I know I could remove things but I am a hoarder by nature and wouldn’t remove things if I felt i might use them again once. Re-flashing forced me to only make the effort to re-install things I knew I would make use of.

The final list was:

Media Players

• ukmp (cool interface and random play all)
• mediacenter (does everything else better than ukmp)
• Quiver (great viewer and being able to see the exif data is cool)
• FMRadio (well you have to don’t you)
• mplayer (plays any video file you can throw at it)

Games

• maemosweeper (kills a few minutes at bed time when I can’t face mahjong)
• penguinpop (ditto)

Applications

• FBReader (for reading everything else)
• Gnumeric (timesheets)
• notecase (every note I don’t want any one else to read)
• WordPy (blogging and Flickr uploads)
• Modest (it’s better than the built in app and fits neater than claws mail even if it’s still buggy)

Utilites

• load-applet (cpu, memory and screen shots all in one place)
• usbcontrol (great when someone throws you a USB key with some stuff on if you have the cable with you that is and a gender changer)
• grsnyc (backup to linkstation)
• rsync (powers the above)
• openssh-client (ditto)
• Camera (the twirly camera on the n800 makes this really useful for odd pics of something other than my ugly mug)

The notable exceptions here are the GPE utilities. I would have kept them if I had been un-installing things but when asking the question “Do I really use it?” the answer was no so I didn’t re-install. I am not sure if any one really cares but I like lists like this sometimes as it gives me ideas about other apps to look at.