Category Archives: Nerdy ruminations

Acer Aspire One experience

Before going to the FastForward 2009 i bought a netbook, an Acer Aspire One, with 1Gb RAM and 160Gb harddisk, running XP. The idea was to use this for notetaking during the conference, since the machine is small and has good battery capability (I got the 6 cell version.)

A funny thing: When I went to buy it, the salespeople tried very hard to get me to buy a subnotebook instead – which would cost upwards of $1000 instead of $329. Margin call? Anyway, a true sign of a disruptive technology is when the salespeople sneer at it, so I predict a great future for these machines. (That being said, I would have liked to get the Sony Vaio P, but it was not yet available and the interesting version was more than $1100. In other words, I can get tree Acers for one Vaio..)

So far, this thing is working very well. Its wireless network access is not as good as my Lenovo X61 – the speed is lower and it seems to not be as good in keeping the connection. The processing power is lower, but as long as I don’t have more than 4 big applications open concurrently, and make sure I quit Firefox about once per 12 hours (it is something of a memory hog) it is just fine.

The keyboard is surprisingly good for such a small size, and I do pack a real keyboard and a mouse in my large travel bag. I do make a few mistypes occasionally, with somewhat unpredictable results, but mostly touch typing goes well, though I would not want to write a dissertation on it.

The touch pad is a tad bit sensitive, I will need to fiddle with some of the settings – it is quite easy to hit it and inadvertently increase the size of the font in Firefox or to accidentally delete large parts of text in Live Writer or Thunderbird. Ctrl-Z is very useful. I would prefer a navigation knob such as is available on the Vaio or the Lenovo computers – more control, fewer accidents.

The thing comes with a camera which I haven’t tried yet and a various other ports and functions which, presumably, work (and were one reason I got this one rather than the HP Mini, which lacked a few.)

So far, so good. Excellent note-taker and internet device, not strong enough to be your main machine unless you are either doing very simple stuff or mainly working online, in which case it is surprisingly good. And it does fit on the tray in economy class, which is a bonus.

Update Feb 10: I find that, with the small screen, I tend to use all applications in full screen mode and switch between them using alt-tab. This is a little bit of a throwback to the mid-90s, when I used DesqView on a text-based DOS machine in the same way. Works fine, though. And the battery worked the whole day yesterday, from 9 to 17 with a small 20 minute charge at the hotel room – which I must say is rather good for a machine at a third of the price of a regular notebook.

Wheels…

Since I am staying in the USA for the spring semester, I have to buy a car (though renting a car is cheap here, it is much less expensive to buy one.) At first, I thought I would just buy a car and sell it when I leave – either a very cheap one that I could just get rid of, or something nicer that I could sell back to a dealer.

Then it occurred to me – why not buy a car which I could take back home to Norway when I am done here? After all, cars are expensive in Norway, and shipping one across the Atlantic is $2000-3000, depending on the size and type.

Now, this is more complicated than it sounds. Import duties on a new car average 200% in Norway, they are prorated for age, but the larger the engine and heavier the car, the higher the duties. So even though nice used cars are ridiculously cheap in the States, the taxes would make the car more expensive than just getting it in Norway.

But there is one loophole: Cars older than 30 years are called "vintage" and subject to a mere 25% sales tax. So I have been trying to find a nice 30 year old car, which I could drive for a few months in the States (so I find out whether there was anything seriously wrong with it) and then ship back to Norway. The requirement was that a) it should not be too expensive (so a Ferrari or something more exotic is out of the question,) b) be reliable (that rules out Jaguars and American cars,) and c) have more than two seats, since there are children and dogs to be transported (and that rules out all those nice Mercedes SLs which are quite easy to come by.)

image So what did I end up with? Well, here it is, a 1977 Mercedes 450 SEL 6.9 (known to car enthusiasts just as a "6.9",) silver paint with a nice blue leather interior and a truly fearsome engine. It has 140K miles on it and a few spots here and there that will need to be fixed, but it as been well maintained, image runs really well and will allow me to tool around Boston and environs with some style. After all, this particular model was more costly than a Rolls Royce when it was launched.

The car handles like a sports car although it is a rather large sedan. This is the first time I have had a car capable of producing instant tire squeal and effortless (and silent) acceleration past 100 mph. As for gas consumption, let’s think about that some other time. I still have to take it to a body shop to deal with some dings and a few rust spots that need welding, but if things work out, I should eventually have a rather stylish vehicle for summer driving back in Norway.

Mercedes 6.9 009 Update February 23: Have now driven the monster for three days (including going through a hail storm in Connecticut.) It does take a bit of getting used to – especially the large steering wheel, which feels like a bus wheel though it has power assisted steering. The climate control is excellent: Set it and forget it. And I find that, despite the zip, it induces the same kind of driving that I used to do with my old Chevrolet Caprice Classic model 1980 back in the mid-90s: Low-stress ambling down the highway, listening to WBUR (one of Boston’s PBS radio stations) and eventually getting there. But this time without the seasickness in curves and with plenty of power to pass other cars, should I feel the urge. Aahhh, relaxation…. I have ordered a chauffeur hat, so I can sneak into the limo line when picking up people at airports….

Incidentally, the picture on the left is of Tom Rossiter, who runs The Stable Ltd, where I bought the 6.9. He has a wonderful collection of what he terms "interesting" cars, so a visit to Gladstone, NJ, is highly recommended.

Tag games again

I’ve been tagged by Kimberly to write seven things about myself (OK, I can do that) and then hit seven other people with the same curse (which I am way to shy to do, unless someone volunteers.) And I will take the opportunity to say that this is the last blogospherical tag game I will participate in. So here goes:

  1. I have once almost collided with a reindeer herd while skiing in a snowstorm just north of Finse in Jotunheimen (with my father). Quite an experience.
  2. I have fallen down in a crevasse once – and almost disappeared into another. One of the reasons my knees are bad and the rest of me is getting fatter.
  3. When young, I was sure I would never have children nor pets – now I (or, rather, we) have three of each.
  4. I really care about keyboards and have more than two for each computer (if you count the internal ones,) including übernerdy varieties.
  5. I often fall asleep in meetings, but don’t be fooled – I pay attention. At least I would want you to think so, especially if you are a student.
  6. I often predict correctly which technologies will win, but never seem to make any money from it.
  7. I used to hate gardening until I got a garden myself. Now I enjoy garden warfare – except digging.

There. Not too painful. Done for now. And forever.

Livesync’ing

I am in the middle of reorganizing backups for the whole family, using Windows Live Sync, which is heartily recommended, except for the small matter of not being able to handle folders with more than 20,000 files. This has caused me to fiddle with shortcuts and splitting My Documents into two folders, not a big problem in itself, but anything that adds a layer of complexity for no benefit is an issue.

FolderShare – the precursor to Live Sync, which has saved me on at least one occasion – could do this, if you bought the Pro version. On the other hand, Live Sync has a much better interface and seems more robust. But what happened to the Live Sync trash bin – if I accidentally delete a file, does it then get deleted on the backups as well? In which case, I will need yet another backup scheme to back up the backups…

How to write in a few simple steps

Practical advice from Cory Doctorow, who has the publishing stream to prove it.

ERP analogies

Andy McAfee uses an analogy of an ERP as a factory for business processes. Here are my analogies:

  • We are born as originals and die as copies. ERP systems are the other way – they start as copies and die as originals. An ERP system, when it is installed, allows you to configure it by choosing parameters – what kind of budget process, how you define "customer", etc. etc. After having set a few thousand parameters, you can be absolutely certain that you are the only company in the world with that particular SAP or Oracle or whatever configuration. Of course, standardization was what ERP systems were all about when they were introduced in the mid-nineties: The idea that software should be simple again.
  • ERP systems are flexible the way cement is flexible. Less true now than it was – cement is ultimately flexible when you pour it, then it hardens into the shape of the hole it was poured into.
  • A more advanced version of this is the old joke that SAP (or insert your favorite ERP system) is like a new basic element. Basic elements go through three stages: Fixed, fluid and gas. SAPium (and its cousin Oraclium) start out as a fluid that runs down and fills the holes (basic business process) you want fixed. It then becomes a gas, expanding to fill the whole area (organization) until it has permeated everything, whereupon it becomes a solid that can never be changed again….

Oh well. Less true now than it was, maybe. Or maybe not.

One of the saving graces of this year…

…is that Anthony Daniels (more commonly known as Theodore Dalrymple) was born in 1949, is less than 60 years old, and thus capable of producing for many years yet. Read him when he discusses imprisoning criminal heroin addicts, when he goes against a former Lord Chief Justice, when he points out the dangerous absurdity of monitoring people’s racial status ("a fragile ego maketh a glad authority"), when he warns against borrowing for consumption more than a year before the financial crisis.

What language, what logic. To quote Horace Walpole via Dalrymple: The world is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel.

Oh, how I wish for a Norwegian pen like his.

Ozzie and the cloud

Steven Levy, a tech writer whose every article I read if I can get my hands on it, has a fascinating Wired article about Ray Ozzie and his long march to make Microsoft survive and prosper in the cloud. Service-based computing can be a disruptive innovation for Microsoft, since customers become less reliant on a single, fat client (dominated by MS) and instead can use a  browser as their main interface.

I have used Lotus Notes since well before the company was bought by IBM, and always considered it to be a fantastic platform that is somewhat underused, chiefly because while its execution is great, the user interface is somewhat clumsy (getting better, but still) and it is hard to program for. As an infrastructure play for a large corporation, Notes is just great. As a platform for software innovation and innovative interaction, it leaves a lot to be desired. The question is – can Microsoft gain dominance in this market (Sharepoint seems to execute on that one), extend it to consumers (Vista is not a good omen here), and somehow find a business model that works? (By that I don’t mean one with it the same profitability as it has now, that just isn’t possible. But one that is somewhat profitable long-term?)

If anyone is going to be able to pull that off, it will be Ozzie. The article paints, as I see it, a very complete picture and tells me a lot more about the relationship between Microsoft and Ozzie than I knew. But that is usual with Steven Levy articles, ever since he wrote "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" back in 1984.

Highly recommended. (And since I like long and detailed articles: this one is at 6900 words or more than 40,000 characters including spaces. Just a hint to my Norwegian newspaper friends, who thinks anything more than 7000 chars won’t be read by anyone.)

Language Fryed and paroled

There are language bloggers, language nuts, language nitpickers, language experts, and then, deliciously, there is Stephen Fry.

Plus ca change….

I clipped this from ACM Technews, an email service of the ACM:

Looking for Job Security? Try Cobol
IDG News Service (10/23/08) Sullivan, Tom
A Cobol programmer may be one of the most secure and steady jobs in IT. Analysts report that Cobol salaries are rising due to a healthy demand for Cobol skills, and there are few offshore Cobol programmers. The troubled economy also bodes well for Cobol programmers, says Interop Systems director of research Jeff Gould, as long as they are working for an organization that intends to keep its legacy Cobol applications. "Many mainframe customers with large mission-critical Cobol apps are locked into the mainframe platform," Gould says. "Often there is no equivalent packaged app, and it proves to be just too expensive to port the legacy Cobol to newer platforms like Intel or AMD servers." Deloitte’s William Conner says salaries for Cobol programmers are rising because many Cobol programmers are reaching retirement age and colleges are focusing on Java, XML, and other modern languages instead of Cobol. Dextrys CEO Brain Keane says Cobol programmers are less likely to have their jobs outsourced because the Chinese do not have mainframe experience and recent Chinese computer science graduates have focused on the latest architectures and systems and do not have experience with legacy languages and systems. Meanwhile, warnings that mainframes would disappear have proven to be untrue, particularly because mainframes are very reliable at handling high-volume transaction processing, and companies are increasingly benefiting from integrating legacy mainframe Cobol applications with the rest of their enterprise.

(Full article here.) With the exception of the part about offshoring, this article could have been written 10 years ago, and be just as true then. There are, of course, a number of programmers in India that know COBOL – converting legacy apps for the year 2000 was one of the jobs that got the Indian IT service industry started.

Come to think of it, I never really learned COBOL, myself. But I was a decent REXX programmer….

Anathematics

Brad Templeton has a long and good analysis (containing spoilers) of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which I read a couple weeks ago and have yet to make up my mind about. On the one hand, it sets up a great world with Concets of Avout who devote themselves to science rather than Praxis, it invents a number of words and does quite a bit of philosophic reasoning on topics Stephenson has explored before, such as multiple universe models. I like the first 200 pages or so really well. Then it becomes a picaresque, and not a good one at that – similar to the tour around the world in the middle book in the Baroque trilogy. Lastly, it becomes a tad puerile, with people flying around in space suits and boarding spaceships.

I love the language that Stephenson creates, and the notion of scientific communities locked in for either 1, 10, 100 or 1000 years (depending on how dangerous their exploits are, it seems) is very interesting. But the plot line could do with some sharpening, and the character descriptions are shallow at best. As is usual with Stephenson, mind you.

So, make up your own mind. I still think Cryptonomicon is Stephenson’s best, but maybe that is just me.

(Minor quibble: I think I found an error, and am enough of a nerd to report it. On page 512-13, we find the sentence "Late yesterday, Yul had shattered the calm by starting the engine of Cord’s fetch, and …." But Cord’s fetch was left on the other side of the pole, wasn’t it (on page 416)? Oh well…..maybe I should update the Anathem Wiki. On the other hand, I have a life.)

Incidentally, Anathem may be the only book published so far that has its own video trailer without first being made into a film. Here it is:

The World of Anathem
http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/embed.aspx/m=41718483,t=1,mt=video

Back to Firefox again….

Google Chrome was great – but for some reason, a number of web sites I use almost daily (such as my Internet bank and pbwiki.com) did not function well with it. In addition, I have had some unexplained bluescreens since I started using it (having 30 windows open at the same time may have had something to do with that.) Lastly, a number of plugins, most importantly Zotero, are not available for Chrome.

So it is back to Firefox again. Still some issues, and I will miss the search-like interface of Chrome (write "af", hit enter, and it takes you to aftenposten.no). Still, ideas (and code) of Chrome is open source, so I expect to see a number of Chrome features in Firefox fairly soon – here is a preview of what is to come.

Now I am getting seriously envious…

…though I do have a TRS80 Model 100 in my office, too.

Check out Jay Walker’s library with Stephen Levy.

Via Boingboing and FrJohnsen.

Search Google from 2001

Google has resurrected their oldest available index (from 2001) – fun to search for "blogging", "wikipedia", "social software", "web 2.0" and "facebook".

Brad Feld on history and future of computing

Good talk at MIT – the good stuff comes towards the end, where he starts to talk about the future. The rest is useful for my students….

A Swiss army knife for the traveling techie

As anyone with some technical knowledge is keenly aware of – at the mere hint of some computer familiarity, you are instantly transformed into the local help desk. I frequently am asked to "take a look at" the PC of some neighbor or more or less distant family member. In most cases, it is a question of cleaning up disks and removing viruses and installed programs.

I am not sure if I really want to do this, but loading this little collection of software onto a memory stick seems like a good idea. Except then you get asked to look at even more barnacled computers….

(Via Stephen Downes.)

Big data in Nature

Nature (the magazine) has an excellent special report on big data, with articles on analysis, history, data centers, and much more. Best of all, it is freely available – enjoy!

Chrome impressions

I have now run Chrome as my default browser for a grand total of 14 hours – impressions so far:

  • Fast. Much faster than Firefox and IE.
  • Each tab is a separate process. Good statistics page allows you to shut down tabs that generate memory gobbles (a Firefox weakness).
  • The user interface is a little sparse, but you get used to that. Miss some functions from Firefox (how too open a local file, for one.) But just a few.
  • Much more graphically oriented than Firefox – pull tabs out as windows, for instance, and windows into tabs.
  • Works better with Google Docs (no surprise there) – showed some formatting codes not visible in Firefox.
  • Flash works – no more 4 seconds play and then full stop on Youtube.

Verdict so far: I thought I would never replace Firefox, but now I am beginning to wonder. If I am still using it in a week, then it is goodbye to Firefox. (I haven’t started testing plugins yet, then again, I don’t have any plugins that are absolutely critical.

First problem (9/4/8): Could not edit an entry at my course wiki (at pbwiki.com) – nothing happened when I click "edit".

Second problem (9/6/8): Could not retrieve a certificate from my net bank. Had to start up Firefox again.

Notable comment: Plus ca change: Jim Courtney on why multi-threading is important. (And yes, I used DesqView and QEMM extensively from about 89 to about 94, too.

Google Chrome

Google is announcing Google Chrome, an open-source browser tailored to, amongst other things, the multimedia rather than text-oriented uses of the web according to this comic by Scott McCloud (warning – slow site at this point). Here are some screenshots – looks to me like they have taken ideas from Opera (thumbnail navigators) as well as Firefox (autocomplete, private browsing). A nice feature seems to be the memory leak monitor – some web pages can cause a lot of memory problems (Incidentally, I installed AdBlock Plus in my Firefox version, which helps a lot.) See Slashdot for the usual comments, Nick Carr has a discussion about this as an important step towards cloud computing (and the goal of Google being to upgrade all browsers). Mozilla says they are not worried about the new competition No points for guessing what is going to be the top search term and discussion topic in the blogosphere this week.

image

Google Chrome, if it is to take off, needs to become a real competitor not to IE or Firefox (they can easily implement most of the added features) but to Vista. And the only way it can do that is by integrating the various Google applications (search, Calendar, Docs, etc.) into the browser. It also needs to be faster than IE or Firefox, and to handle upgrades easily. My guess is some kind of offloading to server-based rendering, much like Opera Mini is doing, making it easier to provide regular HTML to cell phones and the like. If it displays Google apps faster (and more reliable – Youtube is not persistently good on Firefox) than anything else, then it could quickly become important.)

Another way to gain share would be to exploit the enormous collection of user stats that Google has, to produce something that tries to guess the intent of the user and provide suggested links and user-influenced interfaces. Information systems these days is more and more about guessing the users intent rather than having him or her specify it up front, and Google is well informed (too well informed, some would say) about what we like to do.

Update 8/3: Have installed it. Runs fine. Memory management as good as advertised. Won’t be switching over from Firefox soon, but we’ll see over time. As for the story behind Chrome, Steven Levy has a good writeup, as usual, in Wired.

Fry the TyTN

Quoting the incomparable Stephen Fry who just loves the new iPhone:

HTC is a wonderful manufacturer permanently hamstrung by its devices all being Windows Mobile.

Ain’t that the ever-loving truth. I have an HTC TyTN II, which at the outset seemed to be a great little machine, but now it no longer switches screens back and forth between landscape and portrait when you open it; the battery is dying after six months; the touch screen is imprecise and incredibly slow, leading to mouse-aheads and dead ends; I have not been able to connect it to my PC (despite good friends trying to teach me, but when it comes to mobiles I reserve the right to be a moron); the underwhelming synchronization interface has doubled most of my contacts (in the process slowing the whole thing down even more); and worst of all: The Windows Mobile OS, initially quite nice despite its propensity to leave everything running, has acquired more and more barnacles with use and now is just soooo daaarn sloooooooooooow.

Inside this unnecessarily complicated little thingy is a very useful set of soft- and hardware struggling to get out. I just can’t see that most users can be bothered with the digging any more.

What to do? Returning the thing to the local IT department. I need a life. And, if Stephen has any sense at all, an iPhone 3G.