Carpet Bomberz Inc.

Category: technology

General technology, not anything in particular

  • Wikipedia edit wars revisited

    Regarding & related to: Replaying history « Jon Udell.

    Did you know that recently Wikipedia banned editing articles on the Church of Scientology? This reminded me of a project where Jon Udell showed an animation of  edits done to a Wikipedia page. Only through animating and visualizing the process did one really understand what had happens to a Wikipedia article over time. Each bit of phrasing, verbiage and links goes back and forth with paragraphs and sentences disappearing then reappaearing. We don’t think of editing words as inherently visual. Compared to film or music recording, writing prose or technical writing is a mental exercise, not a visual one. Yet, when shown a compelling example like Jon Udell’s we inherently just ‘get it’.

    After that article was published by Jon Udell and since the wikiAnimate example coursed its way through the Internet, there hasn’t been much noticeable follow-up action. Lots of good ideas are left to wither in the Internet Archive. I don’t see a lot of Slashdot activity on visualizing wiki edits. The biggest problem Jon points out with the original wikiAnimate solution was that it would do a round trip of HTTP GET for every step shown in the animation. This loads down the network way too much and hits Wikipedia with to many HTTP GET requests. Jon Udell, ever the vigilant writer/researcher decided to revisit the original idea. Jon is a kind of pragamtist who readily adapts what already exists. He suggests a couple of ways existing projects could be adapted to the purpose of visualizing changes in text as it is written.

    The Wave toolkit from Google is one example. Google Wave has the ability to “playback” conversations back and forth over a period of time. Maybe that ‘playback’ feature could be re-used by an enterprising developer using the Wave APIs. Another possible solution Jon Udell gives is FeedSync which is implemented in the Windows Live webservice. My assumption is there is some kind of flight recording like ability to track each step, then play it back. I don’t write software or develop software. I barely do scripting. however Jon Udell is big on prototyping and showing full examples of how a Social Bookmarking service like del.icio.us could be adapted to the purpose of aggregating community calendars and transforming their contents into multiple output formats for re-consumption. And he’s willing to write just enough middleware and glue code to make it work. It’s a kind of rampant re-usableism. I would characterize the philosophy as this: Sure there’s enough good ideas/products out there one must only decompose the problem to the point where you see the pattern fit well with an existing solution. That’s the true genius of a guy like Jon Udell.

  • “Pine Trail”-Intel’s next Atom CPU revision

    In the netbook manufacturing and product development industry, the next big thing is always Intel’s rev of the CPU and chipset. Cue the entry of the Pine Trail CPU and it’s partner I/O Hub chip. Only just this year has Intel shown a willingness to combine functions onto the same processor die. I am very interested to see that the CPU is combining not just the Memory Controller as is the case the top of the line i7 CPU family. Talk about a weight reduction right? The original chipset consisted of no less than 3 processors a North Bridge and South Bridge along with the CPU. Now with the coming of the Pine Trail, it’s a big CPU/GPU/Memory combo and a single I/O hub. I’m hoping the power consumption improves and comes much closer to the proposed specs of the Android based netbooks that will use Smartphone CPUs like Motorola’s or ARM based System-on-Chip custom CPUs. If Intel can combine functions and get battery life for a 3-cell unit to average 8+ hours under even heavy CPU loads, then they will have truly accomplished something. I’m looking forward to the first products to market using the Intel N450, but don’t expect to see them until after Christmas of this year 2009.

    Atom CPU and chipset
    The Intel Atom

    It should use the technology behind Pineview and would be made built on a new, 45 nanometer design that merges the memory controller and graphics directly into the processor; accompanying it would be the new-generation Tiger Point chipset, which is needed for and takes advantage of the N450 design.

    From: MacNN|Electronista

  • More word on Larrabee, the i740 of new GPUs

    Remembering that the Intel Itanium was supposed to be a ground-breaking departure with the past, can Larrabee be all that and more for graphics? Itanium is still not what Intel had hoped. And poor early adopters are still buying new and vastly over-priced minor incremental revs of the same CPU architecture to this day. Given the delays (2011 is now the release date) and it’s size (650mm^2) how is Intel every going to make this project a success. It seems bound for the the Big Fail heap of the future as it bears uncanny resemblances to Itanium and the Intel i740 graphics architecture. The chips is far too big and the release date way to far into the future to keep up with developments at nVidia and AMD. They are not going to stand still waiting for the behemoth to release to manufacturing. I just don’t know how Larrabee is ever going to be successful. It took so long to release the i740, that the market for low end graphics GPUs had eroded to the point where Intel could only sell it for the measly price of $35 per card, and even then no one bought it.

    Larrabee GPU

    According to current known information, our source indicated that Larrabee may end up being quite a big chip–literally. In fact,we were informed that Larrabee may be close to 650mm square die, and to be produced at 45nm. “If those measurements are normalized to match Nvidia’s GT200 core, then Larrabee would be roughly 971mm squared,” said our source–hefty indeed. This is of course, an assumption that Intel will be producing Larrabee on a 45nm core.

    via Intel’s ‘Larrabee’ to Be “Huge” – Tom’s Hardware.

  • My GAF Viewmaster Viewer

    Henry Fonda
    Henry Fonda

    Futurists are all alike. You have your 20th Century types like the Italians who celebrated war. You have Hitler’s architect Albert Speer. You have guys like George Gilder hand waving, making big pronouncements. And all of them use terms like paradigm and cusp as a warning to you slackers, trailers, luddite ne’er-do-wells. Make another entry in your list of predictions for Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Everyone feels like Apple has to really top what it’s achieved since last year with the Apple iPhone, the iPhone OS and the AppStore. Mark Sigal writing for O’Reilly Radar believes there’s so much untapped juice within the iPhone that an update in the OS will become the next cusp/paradigm shift.

    From today’s O’Reilly Radar article by Mark Sigal:

    Flash forward to the present, and we are suddenly on the cusp of a game-changing event; one that I believe kicks the door open for 3D and VR apps to become mainstream. I am talking about the release of iPhone OS version 3.0.

    from: 3D Glasses: Virtual Reality, Meet the iPhone – O’Reilly Radar.

    I’m not so certain. One can argue that even the average desktop 3D accelerator doesn’t really do what Sigal would ‘like’ to see in the iPhone. Data overlays is nice, for a 3D glasses kind of application sure, but it’s not virtual reality. It’s more like a glorified heads-up display which the military has had going back to the Korean War. So enter me into the column of the hairy eyeball, critical and suspicious of claims that an OS Update will change things. In fact OSes don’t change things. The way people think about things, that’s what changes things. The move of the World Wide Web from an information sharing utility to a medium for commerce, that was a cusp/paradigm shift. And so it goes with the iPhone and the Viewmaster Viewer. They’re fun yes. But do they really make us change the way we think?

  • Suspenders and a Belt: Tips for backin’ up your Mac

    The Mac has Time Machine built right in
    The Mac has Time Machine built right in

    A co-worker has been working on a reporting tool to allow a Mac user to get reports from Time Machine whenever there’s a failure in the backup. Failure messages occasionally come up when Time Machine runs, but it never says what folder, what file or really what kind of failure occured. Which is not what you want if you are absolutely depending on the data being recoverable via Time Machine. It’s not bulletproof and it will lull you into complacency once you have it up and running. I tend to agree that a belt and suspenders approach is best. I’ve read countless articles saying Disk Clones are the best, and on the other side, Incremental Backups are most accurate (in terms of having the latest version of a file) and more efficient with disk space (no need to duplicate the system folder again right?) With the cost of Western Digital My Books dropping all the time, you could purchase two separate USB2 Lifebooks, use a disk cloning utility for one drive, Time Machine for the other. Then you would have a bullet proof backup scheme. One reader commented in this article that off-site backup is necessary as well, so include that as the third leg of your backup triad.

    Since errors and failure can happen in any backup system, we recommend that if you have the available resources (namely, spare external hard drives) that you set up dual, independent backups, and, in doing so, take advantage of more than one way of backing up your system. This will prevent any errors in a backup system from propagating to subsequent backups.

    One strongly recommended solution that we advocate is to have both a snapshot-based system such as Time Machine in addition to a bootable clone system as well using a software package such as SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. Doing this will ensure you can both boot and access your most recently changed files in the event of either data loss or hardware failure.

    via MacFixIt

  • Qualcomm shows Eee PC running Android OS

    Asus Eee PC
    Asus Eee PC

    You wouldn’t think Asus could keep up the blistering pace of development. But here they are once again first to market with a device that uses less power, costs less for the CPU and uses a free OS from none other than Google Inc. What could be better for a bona fide addict of the Google Desktop? Check out the specs on the Snapdragon CPU here.

    If I purchase a netbook at all, this is going to be the one I want just for reading blogs and posting to WordPress. This IS my next computer as far as I’m concerned.

    ” The new laptop — which Qualcomm calls a smartbook — is thinner and lighter than current members of Asustek’s Eee PC netbook lineup because the 1GHz Snapdragon processor that it uses does not require a heat sink or a cooling fan, said Hank Robinson, vice president of business development at Qualcomm.

    Qualcomm’s Snapdragon includes a 1GHz Arm processor core, a 600MHz digital-signal processor and hardware video codecs. Currently, Asustek’s Eee PC line of netbooks relies on Intel processors, in particular the low-cost, low-power Atom chip, which has an x86 processor core.”

    via Good Gear Guide.

  • links for 2009-05-23

  • CSS Web Site Design Hands-On Training

    CSS Web Site Design by Eric Meyer
    CSS Web Site Design by Eric Meyer

    Specifically what is it about CSS that drives me crazy? I am the most evil of ancient dead wood. I am an HTML table man. I got by using tables and got on with my life. I never questioned what I did. I co-worker began beating the drum of usability and web standards about 5 years ago and eliminated tables from his web designs and re-designs. I clung to tables every time somebody pitifully ask me, “Could you make a website for me?”. Usually it was no more than a two cell table to enforce a two column style layout. Picture and text both in their respective cells. Nothing complicated our out of control.

    The day of reckoning is now, I am finally “learning” how to use CSS to enforce the old 2 column style web page I always would get asked to make for people. That’s right simplicity in it’s most essential form. But here’s the rub, you absolutely need to know what you are doing. You need a guide to help you navigate the idiosyncracies and vagueries of the CSS Box model and CSS Layout algorithms. What’s that?!

    Even at this late stage in the evolution of CSS, HTML, CSS2, XHTML and CSS3 and beyond there’s no tag, no markup, no code that will let you express this simple idea:

    Create 2 columns (picture goes on left, text goes on right)

    No, in fact what I’m learning from Eric Raymond’s book written under the aegis of Lynda.com is you need to know how the CSS box model including margins, and padding interact to force the web page to render as you intend it to. While creating a DIV element is stragithforward and having DIVs sit comfortably next to one another (like those old 2 cell tables) getting them to render correctly as the web browser grows and shrinks is tricky.

    On page 131 of CSS Web Site Design, Eric Raymond states (pull quote indicating use of padding in the #content DIV and the negative margin for the #sidebar DIV). This kind of precision with rendering the DIVs is absolutely necessary to replicate the old HTML table formatting. But the workaround, or magic or trick to it all is reading or learning from someone else the fact that a DIVs width is determine by it’s stated width + the margin. If you set the margin to be a negative (which is allowed) the browser effectively subracts that amount from the stated width. When the two numbers add up to -1, the web browser ‘ignores’ the DIV and lets it do whatever it wants. In this example that Eric Raymond uses the sidebar DIV pops up to the same height as the content DIV. Previously, the sidebar had to sit all the way to the right, until the browser go to small, then it would suddenly pop-down below it’s neighbor. With a negative width, the browser doesn’t see the sidebar div and leaves it alone, it doesn’t popdown, it stays right where it is.

    The other half of this equation is to leave generous amounts of padding in the content DIV.  The giant field of padding allows the ignored sidebar DIV to occupy some nice open whitespace, without stomping on any text in the content DIV. So extra padding on left hand DIV, negative width on the right hand DIV and you have the functional CSS equivalent of the two cell table of yore. Wow. I understand the necessity of doing this, I know all the benefits of adhering to accessibility requirements, and maintaining web standards. Nobody should be discriminated against because the website wasn’t designed the right way.

    My own conclusion however is that while CSS does a lot it suffers the same problems as we had under all previous web design regimes. To accomplish the simple stuff, requires deep, esoteric knowledge of the workarounds. That is what differentiates the Dreamweaver jockeys from the real web designers, they know the tricks and employ them to get the website to look like the Photoshop comps. And it’s all searchable, and readable using screen reading software. But what a winding, twisty road to get there. It’s not rocket science, but it ain’t trivial either.

  • links for 2009-04-16

  • Higher Education Board Administration: Board of Trustees SharePoint