Archive for July, 2006

What is a Dual Core Computer?

Monday, July 31st, 2006

For years, I wanted a dual processor machine. Work had them and they are very cool. Instead of contain one block to do all the thinking, they had two. It’s not twice as fast, since they need to communicate with one another but it has other advantages. They don’t age so quickly. I saw dual CPU 10 year old computers still in use, where the single CPUs had been removed years ago. Even a 2 yr old dual Xeon wouldn’t be too bad as a personal computer. The biggest thing you notice is responsiveness. When a request for work hits a CPU it is executed or waits. With two cores there’s less chance it will wait. Responsiveness, means that when one window is crashing and trying to slow the whole machine to a crawl the computer will still respond instead of locking up.

Now, that I waxed loquacious over dual processor machines what is a dual core machine? It’s simple. Inside the one block there are really two CPUs. And they are communicating across the nanometers not inches like in a dual processor machine. CPU chips have shrunk much like everything. Remember how big hearing aids used to be? But the physical chip is the same size or even twice as big. One company, AMD, decided to take advantage of this and throw in an extra CPU. Intel has joined the market in earnest and most or all the machines this Chrismas will be dual core.

I got my dual core last Christmas and it’s been fantastic. Converting movies for TiVo used to take as long to watch the movie. Now it takes 15 minutes. I can assign one CPU to play a movie and the other to play a game. Everyone has seem moment where the computer get really slow doing something mysteriously important to it. With dual core computers, this is very rare. One CPU would handle it and the other would listen to the user.

Recently, priced on these chips have been cut in half by a fight between Intel and AMD. My chip which was $320 at 12/05 is now $150 on 7/6. For the cost of a motherboard and chip, roughly $225 with shipping you could double the speed of your existing computer.

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Suggestions for Keeping up with Technology

Monday, July 31st, 2006

I can plainly see several people in my family who either fail or struggle with technology. It is daunting. There are several instances where technology seemed massive to me. The best example was getting into IBM compatible computers. I come from a very small town in very rural Texas. Before my senior year in high school my school had not purchased computers in over 10 years. My strategy was to simply jump in the middle. Given that you won’t understand everything in a magazine article it will make an impression. The next article will reinforce that impression and provide something else unfamiliar. I guarantee you’ll make lots of mistakes, but it’s ok. So what, you’re the only one to see it.

In recent years, technology changes even faster. But the great advantage to this is some of those changes will help you keep up with technology changes themselves. Learning this one skill, of finding things that find useful things is the most valuable skill.

So, what technologies am I using today?

The most entertaining one is TiVo. The pausing and recording of TV is great, but that’s not why I got a TiVo. My intention was to find something to get me TV shows I was interested in. Don Hunter and I talked for great length about a box that would do just this. In exploring this option, I discovered TiVo. You train it to shows of your taste and it will find that show or something similar and at bizarre times of the day. Perhaps, John Wayne or George Lucas or 1960’s Outer Limits shows are of interest. On a non-fiction basis there are tons of travel shows or cooking shows. Which one would you be interested in? Let TiVo roll the dice you may be surprised. I discovered several shows on PBS and HGTV that I never thought I would car about. For example, I never heard of Texas Ranch House. One day I come in and it’s on TiVo. Another time it was Globe Trekker. The mystical views is that you are providing a channel for the universe to deliver something outside your norm.

Another one is Podcasts and using a podcast aggregator. My favorites are here. These literally come from around the world. The TWiT, Inside the Net, and CommandN ‘casts are excellent ways to find new things. By consuming these you are essentially, paying these people to find new things for you. Some of my finds have been Online calendars, Firefox Extensions, Pandora, YouTube, and Google Maps.

I rarely go a day without checking news aggregator sites. My Personalized Google front page is setup with the top three stories from Wired, BBC, Reuter, New York Times, and TechDirt. I could get the RSS, but I prefer to visit some sites in the web browser. My favorites are Slashdot, Ars Technica, Techmeme, and Tom’s Hardware. These are like the podcasts, but hourly. In fact, TWiT reads a lot of these stories from these sites.

For things I don’t understand Google or Wikipedia is The place to go. A perfect example happened today when I was reading something about ATA over Ethernet. To me this sounded extrordinary, since ATA is a low level hard drive(storage) technology and Ethernet is a much higher level network(computer to computer) transmission protocol. A quick stop over to Wikipedia answered my questions. Or how about when the pidgeons moved into my patio. What is the lifecyle of a pidgeon? How many eggs/babies? How old to pidgeons live, etc.? If it wasn’t on Wikipedia it was an external link on the buttom of the page or in Google.

Now, that I mentioned Google several times I should point out a better search engine I heard about from Inside the Net. Ask.com really is a better search engine than Google. I heard the develop talking about it and explaining it. The advantage over Google is that it tries to predict what you might be looking for. Most people follow the process of , search, refine the search, again and again. Google is not aware that Baracuda is the name of a 1967 Plymouth car and an ocean going fish. In a pane on the right, Ask.com puts additional obvious questions about the car and the fish to help you refine you search.

I’m picky when it comes to music. I like what I like and there’s a lot of crap or simply uninteresting songs. In addition I had making playlists, because I learn to predict the songs. I tend to throw everything together and Saliva doesn’t go great after Gwen Stefani. I’m also quite ignorant of who’s songs I like. Who’s Green Day and why do I care? My solution came from Inside the Net. They interviewed the head of the Pandora and the Music Genome Project. It’s been a great way to find new music. Several of my “finds” show up on the radio stations months after buy their music. For example, The All American Rejects, Saliva, Bowling for Soup and Fall Out Boy. Not everything is going to be great. They’ve got a lot of crap too, but it makes the good stuff even better. Pandora is a lot like TiVo. I train it to what I like and through an intricate classification program it finds similar songs.

In some of these example you can see how one leads to finding another. Also, several of these touch on non-tech areas. I implore, especially my family members, check out one or more of these suggestions. It may completely improve something you don’t even realize was a problem.

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MS Vista Has Version Control

Monday, July 31st, 2006

A few months back I was extolling the virtues of version control for any kind of file. Apparently, Microsoft agrees with me. Its part of the next version of Windows, called Restore previous versions. This is the Ars article about it.

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Stealing Unstealable RFID Cars

Monday, July 31st, 2006

Wired has a great story about cars which come with those unbreakable coded keys to keep people from stealing them. And how they can be stolen, very easily. The author own car was stolen a few years back.

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FYI:Anything Goes at the Border

Thursday, July 27th, 2006

A recent court case has highlighted a 1988 Supreme Court descision that lets Border Patrol perform any kind of searches and seizures to people crossing the border. Probable cause is not a requirement. You might be thinking, “Sure look anywhere someone could hide and illegal substance or immigrant.” However, this decision covers data in laptops, digital cameras, etc. too. In a funny little twist you don’t even have to cross the border of a country. A 2004 case had a man attempt to enter Canada who was denied access and when he “returned” home his possessions were searched by Border Patrol. There is no authority for the proposition that a person who fails to obtain legal entry at his destination may freely re-enter the United States; to the contrary, he or she may be searched just like any other person crossing the border. Apperently, the line on the map which seperates countries does have a thinkness. It’s not like hopping over a fence. It’s several or several hundred feet wide.

So be sure to delete anything incriminating when you cross the border for any erase. This includes pictures of your trip, blog posts on your laptop, etc.

News.com

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.Net Pushing the Boundaries of Indentation

Wednesday, July 26th, 2006

Take a look at the code below. It a short example of what happens when the language is a little too explicit. In most cases all you want to know is if anything is in a variable, usually a string. A simple way to determine if a property is empty is all you want. It’s silly to jump through the hoops of determining if it’s null, if it’s child is null, and if it’s child actually has something interesting in it.

Things like this make me wonder if the languages designers had actually programmed in the decade before they designed this. Or had they been working on theoretical mathematics.

if ( inputField != null )
{
if ( inputField.validation != null )
{
if ( inputField.validation.minValue != null )
{
if (inputField.validation.minValue.Length > 0)
{
…

Should be:

if (inputField.validation.minValue.Length > 0)
{
…

Unless, you actually care to catch the reasons why the various other items are null.

Really, the worst part is the string comparison. Why doesn’t ..minValue.Length return 0 when minValue is null. How often does that little difference matter? Mostly, it matters if the field came from a database. But if you care about that you need an additional test, because null is not the same as DBNull.

Posted in Ideas, Programming, Rambling, Technology | No Comments »

Solutions to Extremely.Long.Lines.of.Code.Scrolling.Off.The.Window

Wednesday, July 26th, 2006

I was writing this line:

inputField.validation.maxValue.Substring(9,inputField.validation.maxValue.LastIndexOf(“}”,9,1))

and thinking there’s got to be a better way. This is an extremely long line of code and really it could be longer. On how many browsers is the line above wrapping around, because the screen isn’t wide enough.

What if the IDE did what the filesystem does for long file paths?

in…maxValue.Substring(9,in…maxValue.LastIndexOf(“}”,9,1))

Or God forbid we actually go back to Assembly language and use Macros, which are variable names that have meaning to the IDE and are translated before they reach the compiler. My idea is to have a list of Macro definitions so you are not using lines of code like variable declarations.

ifValid.max.Substring(9,ifValid.max.LastIndexOf(“}”,9,1))

This is something wholely within the IDE and for display purposes only. Let’s take advantage of some of these “Advanced” features or inheritance to spread the Macro. In the above inputField is inherited from something that has a maxValue. We provide a Macro to make all maxValues into max and inputField.validation into ifValid. This would necessarily be complex, because of the many possiblities of scope; namespace, class, function, inheritance, etc..

The first criticism of this is that it makes code unreadable. We’re going back to the bad old days of single character and cryptic variable names. I submit that we’re going to far with the object.collection.item.property.function().function(). The key difference between short variable names and these proposals it that the later is optional. click a button and you can see the full path. This isn’t a new idea. It’s been used in filesystems for decades.

The important thing is that you can quickly see what is important or unique about each line of code. Creating lines of code that scroll of the window due to their verbosity is contrary to this purpose.

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My Favorite Podcasts

Monday, July 24th, 2006

It has been months since I discovered podcasts and contemplated doing one. Some of the ones I listed to have gone silent, but most art still going string. The best example is This Week in Tech(TWiT) It’s just over a year old. The earliest ones are great and demonstrating the excitement and uncertainty at the beginning of the technology. Podcasting has even gotten to the point where people will pay for certain ones. I’ve come to depend on certain podcasts. My week just isn’t right if I don’t catch these. The list is below, enjoy.

This Week in Tech (California) www.twit.tv/
Inside the Net (Canada) www.twit.tv/ITN
Exploring Unexplained Phenomena (Nebraska) friends-of-eup.mypodcasts.net/
Naked Scientist (UK-BBC) www.thenakedscientists.com/
Systm www.revision3.com/systm

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »

Enforcing Your Local Laws on the Globe

Sunday, July 23rd, 2006

There has been some very stupid things in the news lately that follow a similar vein. Mostly recently is the news of an online gambling site’s exective being arrested for running such a site. The location, Costa Rica, in which the site is based legalizes gambling. In fact, the company is registered on the UK stock exchange. Let me see if I can outline the events so far. American’s betting on sports, where it is illegal, contact someone in a country, where it is legal, to gamble on sports. And someone working for the company is arrested.

This is a very dangerous can of worm’s the FBI has opened. If this is acceptable behavior for Americans it is acceptable behavior for everyone. How many things are legal in this country that are illegal in any of a number of countries? If I drew a cartoon of Allah or Muhammed and traveled to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, etc. I could rightfully be tried and convicted even though my actions were legal were I performed them and the art is legal where it is hosted. Is it my responsibility to be aware of the content on my website, which may be illegal in another country? If I made a documentary about Tiananmen Square should I expect to be arrested when I go to China?

If everyone in the world’s online activity is to be judged by the lowest common denominator we would be left with very little to do and immediately presented with the question of who arbitrates between two parties and who enforces such decisions on a global scale. Which brings in the question of sovereignty. Has each country agreed to pass it’s rights to decide what is acceptable on the Internet to a worldwide group of individuals?

To gamble online or be offended by a cartoon requires two actions by two parties. One is the creation by one party and the other is taking action to view the “illegal” content. It is heinous to hold the first party responsible for the actions of the second party or to judge the first party by the standards of the second.

Right now the website is blocking content from the US. This is certainly technically feasible and relatively easy to do. Is it the right thing to do? Currently, the gambling website first asks someone where they are from (by looking at the IP address) and allowing access or not. This puts the activity of keeping track of each country’s laws onto the gambling website.

Following this standard I must know the laws from every country pertaining to the activity of my website. We leave aside the possibility that the locale that has illegalized a behavior maybe so small (county or state) as to make it impossible to filter internet addresses. The creator of the “illegal” content is still held responsible for the actions others. They live under the threat of prosecution for the actions of others should they travel to the illegitimizing country.

There are only two reasonable solutions we are left with is for the country to deny it’s own citizens access to online content which it deams illegal. I think the best known example of this is the Chinese Great Firewall, which bans content the Chinese government doesn’t want to make available to it’s citizens. This action places the responsibility of monitoring the laws and enforcing the laws upon the citizens who have agreed to live under them.

The other is to make is to take the opposite tack and legalize gambling or any other behavior that would cause this issue to arise. The other unlikely possiblities are to give arbitration and judgement to a single world wide group. Or to hold an individual responsible for the actions of another and to keep track of what is and is not legal behavior for all citizens worldwide. This seems to be what the FBI wants to do.

Maybe they have aspirations we are not aware of. When people learn of this decisions they will cease to come to America for fear of prosecution. So, should we next send the FBI to other countries to arrest employees of websites which are illegal in the Unites States?

The only thing which the gambling executive is guilty of in this case is providing access to content for whom it is illegal to access. He did not commit a crime in his home jurisdiction or this jurisdiction by providing an online gambling site. The illegal behavior was performed by Americans, knowingly in some cases, violating their own laws. Laws which, as a republic state, they have agreed either through inaction or action. If the FBI wants to arrest someone for gambling they should request records indicating the individuals who are responsible and seek to prosecute them according to the laws they live under. Anything else is a violation of the rights of an individual, corporation, or sovereign nation. If the FBI cannot respect these rights they have no business enforcing the laws upon which those rights are based.

P.S. I was tempted, but I don’t even want to go into the fact the online gambling legislation is before congress right now and this arrest plays right into a free publicity stunt for such legislation.

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Digital Cameras

Sunday, July 23rd, 2006

There’s been news lately about the film camera makes stopping thier production and/or development. After getting a digital camera at Christmas it’s easy to see why. The digital camera is just easier. It combines the speed and easy of a Polaroid with the quality of a cheap 35mm with the options of a computer based technology.

The little LCD screen on the back lets you share the photo with the person who was just in it. There’s no waiting like with a Polaroid. It’s funny to me that the LCD is about the size of the pictures my mom took with her camera in the 1970’s.

The cheap and huge storage makes archival easier. I got a 512mb card with my camera. That’s about 480 pictures. There’s no need to carry 4-6 temporary cameras for a trip. My camera has everything I’ve ever taken with it.

The other day I needed some prints of some particularly good pictures. I just went into Walmart and got 2 5×7s and an 8×10 for 10 bucks. Besides that I haven’t any money on pictures since December last year.

Since the camera is a mini computer it has all sorts of features like autoflash detection, digital zoom to 16x, image stabilization, red eye removal, and more. It easily integrates with the computer to post the pictures on the internet for everyone to see. You don’t have to carry them around, so that two months later you can look at the pictures. They can be available the next day.

I’m extremely please with the digital camera. Everyone should have one.

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Visual Studio Window GUI enhancement Idea

Friday, July 21st, 2006

I’m working with Visual Studio 2003 a lot for the past several months. As a UI designer myself there a lots of things I would add or change.

For one, the bar between the toolbar and main editor, which displays the filenames is nearly worthless and takes up a lot of space, at least one extra line. It’s cleverly useless though. It displays the filename and path you are looking and you can click left and right arrows to scroll to other files that are also open. Sounds great. Why is it useless? If you are editing anything with more than 3 or 4 files you have to use the left and right errors alot. It’s faster to use the huge Project Explorer Pane. I’m typically viewing and editing 30-50 files. So, not particularly useful.

A nice enhancement would be a window quick enlargement. The use case goes like this. I’m looking for something which is in one of many files. So, I search for it. Normally, this list should be very small so I seem much of the file editor and little of the list. But when I’m scanning across hundreds of found instances I want to see that as the big pane. Now, you have to resize the window. But a single click action on the Find Pane’s bar which double or tripled the vertical size would make this much easier. When I’ve double clicked one of the items in this pane, the pane should return to it’s original size, tiny.

By default the toolbars come with lots of junk that no one uses. This is a huge waste of space. The defaults need to be set narrower. What is the core usage of the IDE? It’s a text editor with the ability to run and debug the app. So features like un/commenting a block of code are great. But if you are using the indent buttons you need to go back to using Notepad (little clue Tab and Shift-Tab. Undo/Redo yes. Solution Explorer and Class View no. These are both big UI changes. Should you really be doing that every few minutes. Also, these buttons only open the class view, they don’t open/close it. For that you must use the standard x button. A lot of us Attach to Existing processes instead running the app in debug mode. Attach, Detach, and Exceptions should be default toolbar buttons.

By default stupid panes are displayed in the GUI. The best example is the Toolbox pane. How often are you drawing the GUI? If it’s every few minutes great, but most of us draw (if you’re inexperienced to use a static GUI) once and then spend hours writing and testing code. Close the Toolbox pane.

Posted in Computers, Ideas, Programming, Rambling | No Comments »

We Paint Mom’s House

Saturday, July 15th, 2006

My mom’s going through a lot of stuff right now. On the 4th of July weekend, her house was broken into while she was out and some things were stolen. The police fingerprinted the area, which turned out to be her bedroom. If you have not seen the black fingerprinting powder you’re very fortunate. It’s extremely difficult to remove, especially from shag carpet. So in addition to the theft, she had to replace the carpet. Which was much more expensive than the items taken. With the carpet it seemed like a good idea to repaint the walls. Several months ago whe repainted the living room a soothing light green. For her bedroom, we went to Walmart and picked out an off-pink(?) mostly white latex.

On Saturday, Gma, Kayla, and I drove to mom’s house for the painting party.

My sister’s daughter, Kayla almost 3.5, was visiting for the week. I got several pictures of her. She obviously likes to pose for the camera. A very direct and smart girl. There are several anecdotes about her. It occurred to me that hers is the first generation that will grow up on the internet. I’m writing and taking pictures of her that will likely still be available as she ages. She could live to 100 with “intimate” publicly available documentation for the whole time.

And several pictures of mom’s pond and backyard. She had a number of fish and plant giant pumpkins everywhere. She has a contest going with her brother, Stanley, and Eric Carter’s(?) dad about who can grow the largest pumpkin. They have leaves that stand about 10″ off the ground and are 16″-20″ across.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures of the painting. :)

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New Device to Read for the Blind

Thursday, July 6th, 2006

A new device has been invented which combines a PDA with a digital camera to read various text elements to a visually impaired person. The National Federation of the Blind [Dallas News] spent $2 million developing the device which sells for $3500. It is intended to read many things not geared to sightless senses, like receipts, checks, menus. It took around three years to develop [BBC News]. To keep from broadcasting the text you can use a standard Bluetooth wireless headset like those made for cell phones.

I’m amazed at the low cost and short time such a valuable device took to create. If $2 millions buys us this, what would $5. We need more devices like this.

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TiVo Links

Thursday, July 6th, 2006

These two sites are great for TiVo and PVR links. TiVo is heating up. They signed deals with DirectTV concerning patents and renewed DirectTiVos license, which are the majority of TiVos. Comcast and TiVo signed a deal to make Comcast DVRs by TiVo. They upped the monthly price from $14/mo to $11-$20/mo. The Series 3 boxes will start shipping in a month or two. Series 2 boxes could be had for free considering the rebate a few days ago and remember a year subscription is minimum. The new 7.3 software with KidZone began downloading. The new 2.3 desktop software converts recorded programs for the video iPod. Everyone one seems to admit they are the gold standard in DVRs.

Zatz Not Funny
PVR Blog

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Grandma’s Fourth of July Cookout

Tuesday, July 4th, 2006

A lot of things happened this weekend when I went to my grandmother’s house. One of the coolest things was getting a picture of these three barn? owls roosted in the tree above the cookout. The owls are together with the left and right ones look in the away and the center owl looking directly at the camera with those huge eyes. This just screems out to be wallpaper so I’m posting it ahead of the other pictures. Several people requested a copy. I have the full size original, email me if you want a larger picture file.

Update 1: 7/23/2006 – Here are the July 4th pictures.

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