Geek stuff – Page 134 – a sibilant intake of breath

Cataloging fiction

One of my favourite things about Wikipedia is how it includes masses of detail about fictional universes, as well as the particular one we seem to inhabit. Those wanting to learn about particular features of Herbert’s Dune universe, the Tolkien legendarium, or any of dozens of others have access to encyclopedic articles about them. Some people dismiss the effort of imagination that goes into such verisimilitude as a wasteful exercise. Far healthier, I think, is to see it in one of two ways. At a lesser level, such alternative universes can be a mechanism for criticizing important features of our own. The anti-mutant paranoia in the X-Men comics was a response to McCarthyism. At a higher level, they simply allow for the envisioning of the world as it might be. Especially for children, this is a valuable thing to encourage.

Being able to appreciate Miyazaki films is the bare minimum level of imagination that should be accepted from human beings. Being able to appreciate other such alternative realities is a characteristic that should be respected, rather than mocked.

A reminder to classmates

Note: graphs are the purest and most compelling form of self-expression.

Microbiology on display

This is too cool not to link: The Inner Life of the Cell

This short video shows animations of some of the chemical processes that occur inside living cells. I only recognized a handful, but they are all beautiful and surreal. The focus is on the behaviour of lymphocytes in the presence of inflammation.

[Update: 13 December 2007] The links above had become outdated. As of today, they are repaired.

GoDaddy is too slow

I am thinking of switching hosting providers for this site. Those with a technical bent may wish to read on.

Continue reading “GoDaddy is too slow”

Quicksilver: nice free addition to OS X

I have found a way to reduce the extent to which the Dock in OS X is annoying. Two things about it are especially bothersome. The first is how it makes it overly easy to accidentally launch applications that take a long time to load. In particular, I find myself accidentally hitting the Word and Excel icons once in a while: programs that I make sure to only run when I absolutely need them. The second is how it changes shape and position, which is simply bad design. Turning off ‘hiding’ helps, but there is still the matter of the Dock getting longer when you run more programs. The following helps with the first problem only. Hopefully, a bit of a UI re-think will be done for Leopard.

One way to reduce the frustration is with Quicksilver. It is like a version of Spotlight that is actually useful on a minute-by-minute basis, even for someone well organized enough to know where a particular file will be. You can use a key combination to bring up the Quicksilver ‘launcher’ and then type the first couple of characters of an application that you use often, but want to remove from the Dock. Similarly, it can be used to rapidly bring up contacts, folders, iTunes tracks, iPhoto albums, and other such things. You can, for instance, type the name of an iTunes playlist and have it start playing, all in under a second, without having to open the iTunes window.

One more nice thing about it is that it isn’t tied exclusively to Mac applications. People will call me a heretic for preferring Entourage over Mail, but I am sticking with it. Likewise, Firefox over Safari and Adium over iChat.

Mac users who want to get the most out of their operating environment should definitely give it a whirl. It becomes useful in less than ten minutes.

Compressed air for mobile energy storage

All of a sudden, the air car concept is popping up everywhere. I hadn’t head of it before someone left a comment yesterday. Now, it is on Metafilter, Slashdot, and YouTube.

I must admit that the prospect of a $7,500 car that can run for 200-300km on $3 worth of compressed air sounds pretty amazing. Of course, the compressed air would just be a storage mechanism for energy generated in other ways. The advantage over hydrogen and fuel cell systems of biodiesel could lie in lower infrastructure costs. Installing compressors in homes and service stations already connected to the electrical grid is a lot cheaper than developing a whole new hydrogen infrastructure, leaving more money to direct towards genuinely renewable sources of energy. The compressors could also be powered directly by wind or water turbines, as well as solar power systems. As for biodiesel, once you factor in the energy required to grow the crops and process them, as well as the inefficiency of internal combustion engines and the continued reality of toxic emissions, it doesn’t seem like a hugely alluring prospect to anyone but corn farmers.

While it is unlikely that one technology will allow us to overcome fossil fuel dependence, it does seem sensible to think that something like this could be part of the mix. Especially if the energy being used to compress the air is coming from a renewable, non-greenhouse-gas-emitting source, these cars could make a big difference in the developing world. They could also help tackle urban air pollution, such as the kind plaguing Beijing.

PS. I got today’s photo of the day in Oriel College, as part of my initiative to photograph each college at least once. While there, I discovered a sizable conference on climate change ongoing, about which I had heard nothing. This goes to show just how many people are working on the issue, both here at Oxford and more generally.

Bad prioritization

Wadham just replaced most of the computers in our lab with brand new HP 2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo machines, complete with new keyboards and monitors. This strikes me as pretty wasteful, given that the previous machines were completely adequate for web browsing and word processing – the only tasks for which the computers in the lab are ever used.

The new machines probably cost about £500 each: money that could have been much better spent on scholarships or some other purpose that serves student needs. Having three or four fast computers with Photoshop or similarly resource-intensive software makes sense; buying a dozen high power machines for mundane tasks does not. When running Word and Firefox, the performance difference on the new machines cannot even be noticed.

At least they didn’t upgrade to Vista.

Waiting for SkypeIn in Canada

Canadian telecom regulators should hurry up and allow the allocation of SkypeIn numbers. The deal is that you pay about $50 a year to Skype for a phone number in an area code of your choice. People can then call it from within that area, as though it were a free local call. They would actually be calling a computer that forwards the call to your Skype account, on whatever computer or Skype-enabled phone you are using, anywhere in the world. You can also have it automatically redirect calls to another normal phone, though there is a per-minute charge for that.

The system seems really good because people in your designated area can call you without worrying about long distance charges. Also, people who don’t find the whole Skype system comprehensible can call you without any knowledge of how it all works. Supposedly, it is unavailable in Canada because it is incompatible with 911, but this doesn’t make a great deal of sense, since SkypeIn numbers receive calls, rather than initiate them.

With a combination of SkypeIn and Skype Unlimited (which costs $30 a year and includes unlimited calling to landlines), I could speak an unlimited amount to friends in North America for less than $75 a year, with benefits such as being able to use any internet cafe that has Skype installed as though it were my home phone. I just need to wait for Canadian regulators to permit the final link in the chain.

PS. I realize that I could buy a SkypeIn number for New York or Seattle, which would be very cheap for friends in Canada to call. Losing the convenience of it being a local call, for them, is the reason I have not done so thus far, though you can attach SkypeIn numbers in up to ten area codes to a single Skype account.

Information saturation

There is no time when it is easier to get distracted from a task than when it is something long, complex, and challenging. My room is never cleaner than at the periods before exams, nor my emails so well managed as at times when I have some massive research project to complete. The number of possibilities on the web: from blogging to instant messaging, compound the danger. So too, the special stresses involved in thesis writing.

This month’s issue of The Walrus includes an article called “Driven to Distraction” that addresses the issue of how many such temptations exist in a digital age. I subscribe to 127 different information feeds: most of which get updated more than once a day, and some of which are regularly updated more than twenty times a day. Beyond that, I have email, the manual screening of spam from blog comments and wiki pages, Facebook, constantly updating access logs for various sites, text messages on my cell phone, and news websites that I track.

Just as I have frequently used music and immersion in a laptop-free coffee shop environment to try to get some reading done, I am going to try to reduce the frequency with which I am checking my various feeds: staying logged out of Bloglines and email and checking each only a few times a day (or at least every couple of hours, instead of virtually constantly). Maybe then I will be able to finish hammering out a new version of chapter two, as well as drafts of chapters three and four, before Dr. Hurrell departs for Brazil, leaving me to finish my thesis entirely on my own.

Spring, geeky tech, and the continued tapping of thesis words

Today has been fairly productive, with one excellent break out in Oxford’s sunlit gardens and along its warm paths. I am well on the way to having the structure of chapter two revamped, though my introductory sections for chapters three and four still need to be finished. The most difficult thing is staying focused for any length of time. It is all too easy to find a more immediately satisfying way to use one’s time.

Speaking of immediate satisfaction, this week’s Economist features their Technology Quarterly (most of the links below require a subscription). Most of it is stuff that is pretty familiar: cellulistic ethanol, solar power (mentioned here recently), data visualization, display technologies, and climate engineering. One thing that was new to me is the emergence of ‘haptic’ touch screens that are able to simulate the feeling of various materials by slightly stretching the skin of the fingers touching them. It is possible to make tapping on a screen feel like pushing a button, or even make a flat screen feel like a sharp edge. It doesn’t take much thinking to imagine some really interesting applications for such technology, particularly in terms of making technology more comprehensible and accessible.