Quotulatiousness

September 25, 2009

Honda decides it’s sick of being seen as a cool company

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:57

Honda has introduced something to help it shed that coolness factor that’s been bothering it for a while. I guess they figured that Segway shouldn’t be the only company whose name is mocked for innovation in personal mobility:

Gentlemen, start your incredibly lazy engines: Honda has a new answer for those of us too tired to get off our keisters. Meet the U3-X “personal mobility device,” a unicycle-like ride that makes heading into the kitchen for pie as easy as — well, pie.

Sure to excite mall cops everywhere, the Honda U3-X makes the Segway look like an outdated piece of junk that no one in their right mind would ride. (Actually, the Segway already looked like that. Disregard.) The device is a 2-foot tall infinity-symbol lookalike with two pull-out pads for your tuchas. Marketed as a mobility device that “co-exists in harmony with people” — yes, seriously — the U3-X lets you hop a squat and zip around a room simply by shifting your body weight.

September 21, 2009

Come on, Microsoft!

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:56

I’ve discovered the guaranteed no-fail, works-every-time method to lock up your Vista laptop. It’s kind of complicated, so follow along carefully with these intricate and unlikely-to-occur-in-ordinary-use steps:

  1. Open Windows Explorer.
  2. Select a file.
  3. Right-click the file and select Rename from the context menu.
  4. Profit?

Yes, that arduous and complicated set of steps — that nobody would ever discover during normal use — are enough to consistently lock up my laptop. Lock up tight enough that recovery requires removing the battery to force the machine to power down.

September 17, 2009

On demand book printing

Filed under: Books, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:17

Want a copy of a rare old out-of-print volume? For collectors and antiquarians, this is probably of lesser interest, but for researchers and readers, this is great news:

What’s hot off the presses come Thursday?

Any one of the more than 2 million books old enough to fall out of copyright into the public domain.

Over the last seven years, Google has scanned millions of dusty tomes from deep in the stacks of the nation’s leading university libraries and turned them into searchable documents available anywhere in the world through its search box.

And now Google Book Search, in partnership with On Demand Books, is letting readers turn those digital copies back into paper copies, individually printed by bookstores around the world.

Or at least by those booksellers that have ordered its $100,000 Espresso Book Machine, which cranks out a 300 page gray-scale book with a color cover in about 4 minutes, at a cost to the bookstore of about $3 for materials.

September 16, 2009

Latest brain fart from the British government

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:54

Cory Doctorow sent a Twitter message yesterday, linking to the OpenRightsGroup.org petition page:

The freedom for each and everyone of us to express our views on the internet is under threat like never before. The UK government is now considering laws that would allow individuals to be cut off from the internet. They say the reason is to protect the economic prosperity of the creative industries.

Our coalition comprises organisations, charities and people who believe disconnection from the internet would mean that people like us would be unable to engage in banking, socialising, campaigning, home admin and many other activities that are increasingly moving online. Worse, disconnection would restrict our long standing right of freedom of expression just at the time when we all need to be able to critique and engage more than ever.

If Lord Mandelson’s plan becomes law, disconnection may start for copyright infringement, with no guarantee it would not be extended for other things.

You don’t have to have much imagination to come up with lots of ways this little policy initiative could go pear-shaped very quickly. Pear-shaped, that is, for the poor folks caught up in the legal machinery. ASBOs were a terrible notion — and appear to be worse in practice than anyone thought when they were first introduced, but they’ll pale into insignificance if this horrible idea gets accepted by the government.

September 12, 2009

The most welcome improvements in iPhone 3.1

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:25

Brian Chen looks at the improvements that are likely to be most popular with iPhone users:

A major addition to iPhone 3.1 are Genius recommendations. Similar to the iTunes function of the same name, iPhone’s Genius feature helps you search for apps you may wish to download based on those you already own. Also, iPhone 3.1 enables you to easily sort apps on your computer screen using iTunes 9. As helpful as these new features sound, iPhone 3.1 comes with major drawbacks: the loss of free, unauthorized tethering and the inability to access the unauthorized app store Cydia. One more caveat: After upgrading to iPhone 3.1, you can’t downgrade to 3.0.

That’s a tough predicament, and many likely face a dilemma. Should you download now or give hackers some time to re-exploit the system? Here, we dive into the pros and cons of the software update to help you make a decision you won’t regret.

As I haven’t jailbroken my phone, the loss of access for Cydia customers isn’t particularly important to me (but I’m sure it’ll be addressed ASAP by the folks there). It’s about time that Apple provided a better way to manage the location of apps in the user interface other than finger-twitching on the iPhone itself.

Grumble, mutter, frickin’ hard drives, grumble mutter

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:06

So . . . I finally get the desktop back from the shop. Another dead hard drive. Oddly enough, another Seagate. You’d think by dead drive #4, I’d start to notice a pattern, wouldn’t you?

Yep. After the old Seagate 120Gb drive died, which was neither unexpected nor particularly traumatic — because I had backups that worked — I just disconnected it and carried on . . . no point in powering a dead drive. It had had a long and useful life as the primary drive in my previous desktop, so it had paid its dues.

The two 320Gb Seagate Free Agent drives having MTBF measured in tens of hours was depressing, but oh well. It’s not like either one of them lasted long enough to actually be, you know, useful or anything.

The fricking Seagate 500Gb primary backup drive crapping out after just over a year was more than a bit disappointing. It was the drive I’d been using for backups and for local storage of infrequently needed things (photos, old documents, scans, etc.). Not everything on the drive had made its way to other media, of course. Some documents lost, some scans I’ll have to re-do, and so on.

So, today’s to-do list includes picking up a 2-bay drive enclosure with an Ethernet port, and a matching pair of big hard drives to put in it. RAID-1, here I come.

Update: I’m now waiting for the pair of 1Tb hard drives to be formatted for RAID-1. Advice from Chris Taylor, Andre B., and Dark Water Muse was much appreciated, thanks guys. I ended up buying a D-Link DNS-323 for the enclosure, and a pair of Hitachi SATA drives. I’d have preferred the Western Digital Green equivalents, but they were out of stock, and I wanted to get this up and running today.

September 11, 2009

This looks like a lot of fun

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:44

Not yet commercially available, but a fascinating proof-of-concept model. H/T to Peter Suderman.

September 10, 2009

I guess they can update RFC1149 now

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

I guess that this story means they’ll have to update the old RFC 1149: Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avia:

Broadband promised to unite the world with super-fast data delivery — but in South Africa it seems the web is still no faster than a humble pigeon.

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country’s biggest web firm, Telkom.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles — in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm’s slow internet speeds.

September 7, 2009

PSA: Back up your data

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:57

I’ve been having frequent enough issues with my various computers that backing up regularly (which I’ve done for years) isn’t as simple as it used to be. Now that I’m running both a desktop and a laptop machine (at least, when the desktop gets back from the repair shop), plus everyone else in the household’s machines, my old backup strategy fell flat.

My old strategy was each machine on the network using the same backup software (Cobian Backup 9) to create differential backup files — only saving the files that changed since the last complete backup was taken — and storing them on a secondary hard drive on my desktop machine.

As you can tell, there’s an easily defined point of failure there: if my machine isn’t online or there’s an issue with the secondary hard drive, the backups will fail to run. So we’ve been over a week now without the usual backups being taken.

My short-term strategy is just to worry, but my longer-term strategy is to buy something like this, a 2Tb network drive with RAID 1 (disk mirroring). That still leaves a point of failure in the process, but with RAID, I can hope that unless both drives in the unit fail at the same time, there’s only a small chance of serious data loss.

Update: That just figures . . . it’s now marked as unavailable, but the 1Tb NAS is still in stock.

Update, the second: Here’s an up-to-date article on backup strategies.

September 6, 2009

Some good advice from the WordPress developers

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

WordPress blogs (like this one) have been recently under attack by a worm tailored to a weakness that existed in older versions of the blogging software. Here’s the scoop.

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.

The tactics are new, but the strategy is not. Where this particular worm messes up is in the “clean up” phase: it doesn’t hide itself well and the blogger notices that all his links are broken, which causes him to dig deeper and notice the extent of the damage. Where worms of old would do childish things like defacing your site, the new ones are silent and invisible, so you only notice them when they screw up (as this one did) or your site gets removed from Google for having spam and malware on it.

In short, if you haven’t already upgraded your WordPress blog to the current version, you’re inviting trouble.

September 4, 2009

Survey of military use of UAV assets

Filed under: Military, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:17

There’s a useful overview of how Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are changing the tactical situation for troops on the ground in this week’s Economist Technology Quarterly section:

Drones are much less expensive to operate than manned warplanes. The cost per flight-hour of Israel’s drone fleet, for example, is less than 5% the cost of its fighter jets, says Antan Israeli, the commander of an Israeli drone squadron. In the past two years the Israeli Defence Forces’ fleet of UAVs has tripled in size. Mr Israeli says that “almost all” IDF ground operations now have drone support.

Of course, small and comparatively slow UAVs are no match for fighter jets when it comes to inspiring awe with roaring flyovers — or shooting down enemy warplanes. Some drones, such as America’s Predator and Reaper, carry missiles or bombs, though most do not. (Countries with “hunter-killer” drones include America, Britain and Israel.) But drones have other strengths that can be just as valuable. In particular, they are unparalleled spies. Operating discreetly, they can intercept radio and mobile-phone communications, and gather intelligence using video, radar, thermal-imaging and other sensors. The data they gather can then be sent instantly via wireless and satellite links to an operations room halfway around the world — or to the hand-held devices of soldiers below. In military jargon, troops without UAV support are “disadvantaged”.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a current-day Economist article without at least one gloomy caveat:

There is a troubling side to all this. Operators can now safely manipulate battlefield weapons from control rooms half a world away, as if they are playing a video game. Drones also enable a government to avoid the political risk of putting combat boots on foreign soil. This makes it easier to start a war, says P.W. Singer, the American author of “Wired for War”, a recent bestseller about robotic warfare. But like them or not, drones are here to stay. Armed forces that master them are not just securing their hold on air superiority — they are also dramatically increasing its value.

I don’t particularly credit this risk . . . as Chris Taylor pointed out in a comment on a recent post, “degrading the comm links is the easiest way to render UCAVs largely toothless. In their current incarnation they are only good for permissive environments where the other guy can’t really harm your aircraft or comms. When they get autonomous then they’ll be more practical for warfighting against advanced foes.”

Actually, go read the comment thread on that post. Between Chris and “cirby”, I think they cover the technical side very well indeed.

September 3, 2009

AT&T may be happy to end exclusive iPhone deal with Apple

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:32

According to Henry Blodget, AT&T may be willing to see the end of their exclusive deal with Apple to support the iPhone, as the traffic is “Crushing AT&T’s Cell Network”:

  • Performance issues will likely hasten the end of AT&T’s exclusive on the iPhone (which is scheduled to end next year anyway). At this point, it would actually be in AT&T’s interest to spread the network demand around.
  • AT&T will have to spend a lot of money and rush to upgrade the network before its reputation gets any worse (a third of people who don’t buy iPhones don’t buy them because of AT&T)
  • This is GREAT news for the future of the mobile web: Now that the iPhone has created a compelling mobile online experience, mobile usage is finally exploding. This is already leading to the growth of a whole new industry based on mobile apps and gadgets.
  • This is great news for the iPhone: If people are willing to put up with performance this lousy, it shows how much they love their iPhones.

QotD: “The red-headed step-child of the environmental movement”

Filed under: Environment, Quotations, Railways, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 16:48

As a practical matter, we’d probably get more environmental benefit (and save more wear-and-tear on our roads) from improving our freight rail system, like the abysmal mess in Chicago, than from high speed passenger rail that is very unlikely to carry more than a handful of Americans on any regular basis. . . But this does not attract one eightieth of the interest that you see in HS(P)R. As I understand it, there is finally some actual progress on Chicago, but it’s still bogged down in process, and it’s not clear to me whether it’s really enough. It seems clear to me that switching freight to rail whenever possible should be a policy priority, but it’s the red-headed stepchild of the environmental movement. We need freight cars that look more like pandas.

Megan McArdle, “Rail: It’s Not Just for Passengers”, Asymmetrical Information, 2009-09-03

September 1, 2009

The suffering . . . the suffering

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:10

Dark Water Muse has a terrible weekend:

Offline nobody can hear you scream

Like, Oh My God! WTF!? You so totally won’t believe what I’m going to tell you.

I lost my 5mbs DSL home internet connection sometime after 14:43 and before 15:00 on Friday August 28, 2009.

Now, it’s 19:29 Monday August 31, 2009. Still nothing. I’ve had a high speed DSL connection since the mid-90’s. I was among Bell Sympatico’s earliest subscribers. I shouldn’t be exposed to this kind of thing now. It’s unnatural. It’s the 21st century.

I’ve been forced to endure this for over three days. Can you imagine?

The horror.

The inhumanity.

The uncertainty of where to rest my thumbs if not on the space bar.

I only just managed to survive throughout the weekend. I ate fresh grubs and tender bamboo shoots until my fourth floor apartment condo neighbors caught me and forced me back into my apartment by whacking me with a broomstick. So, at least part of my weekend was normal.

August 31, 2009

QotD: Apple’s App Store Antics

Filed under: Quotations, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:55

Oh, Apple Computer. What sorts of antics are you into this month?

Since the iPhone was released two years ago, watching Apple keep its obsessive vise grip on the device while trying to promote third party application development has been one solid I-didn’t-know-you-could-do-that after another.

Battle the recording industry for liberal music licensing terms and build the largest online music store, all the while living out the RIAA’s wet dream by manually approving every bit of code that runs on a computing device? I didn’t know you could do that.

Being run by an ex-hippie CEO who used to spike his Oolong tea with LSD, and then carrying on Jerry Falwell’s legacy by protecting the children from iPhone programs that show a bit too much skin? I didn’t know you could do that.

Have a board member whose own company makes a device that directly competes with your bread and butter? Well, I knew you could do that in Silicon Valley, because we’re all such good friends.

That is, at least, until the old crusties from AT&T show up with their Geritol and single letter ticker symbol. Here in the Valley, we run more at a line-of-blow-off-a-stripper’s-ass speed, so when Apple rejected the Google Voice application for the iPhone, everyone suspected that AT&T strong-armed them into kicking the Google to the curb. In fact, the move was so out of character that the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) — the governmental agency responsible for keeping seven dirty words off the public airwaves — started asking questions. Well, Apple got all butthurt and went on the defensive, posting an open reply to the FCC on their website.

Ted Dziuba, “Feds break Apple’s code of App Store silence: Heads you’re in. Tails you’re out”, The Register, 2009-08-31

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