Category: Geek stuff

If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.

First impressions of Tiger

Installation, performance, and headline features

Installing Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) was a breeze – certainly the only time I have been surprised by the ease of installing a major OS upgrade on top of an existing installation. Because of the simultaneity of my RAM upgrade and the installation of Tiger, I can’t discuss the performance effect of the new OS. In aggregate, the iBook runs like a whole new machine. While it used to creak and complain when running just Fetch and iPhoto, it now runs Firefox, iTunes, iPhoto, Photoshop, TextEdit, and Fetch without any trouble. Indeed, 321 megs of RAM are still inactive with that collection, as a Dashboard widget informs me (along with weather forecasts for Oxford, and the all-important Canada-England exchange rate).

Another widget (pearLyrics, suggested by Jessica) is adding lyrics to my iTunes tracks as they are played, though it is oddly myopic when it comes to absurdly popular songs not released in the last ten years (most songs by Pink Floyd and The Beatles seem to stump it). This is a particularly useful function for me, as I am prone to either ignore lyrics entirely, focusing on the tone of a song, or spectacularly misinterpret them. I will leave the specific examples to my friends, for use in mocking me at parties.

Spotlight hasn’t proved terribly useful to me yet, mostly because I already have all my information sorted for easy location. That is not too unusual, however. All advanced search tools – from Google to Oxford’s OLIS – take time to become familiar enough to be really beneficial. Next time I am digging around for a particular file not viewed in months, it may prove its worth.

I have not used Automator yet, but I eventually want to create a workflow that takes an image file from iPhoto, opens it in Photoshop, resizes it to either 1024 pixels across for horizontal shots or 768 from top to bottom for vertical ones, lets me adjust the levels, lets me apply an unsharp mask, then creates a 320 pixel across the long axis thumbnail version, and uploads both versions to my server using Fetch. Ideally, it would then create an appropriate block of code to paste into WordPress, but this is all a project for a less hectic time.

Newly usable software

One of the reasons I decided to upgrade to Tiger was the desire to use the free application WriteRoom. The essence of simplicity, it is just a black screen onto which you type. Unlike almost all Mac applications, it can be made to take up the whole screen. There is no formatting – though there is optional spell-checking – and the simplicity seems to contribute to my ability to concentrate on the topic at hand. At a stroke, it becomes more like writing a letter than writing an email, which is clearly a valuable transition in a world where enough attention is rarely paid to written expression.

As soon as I can get my Airport card to work in passive mode with packet injection capabilities, the new version of KisMAC seems likely to be quite useful. It is already rather better than the standard Mac OS WiFi interface, in terms of detecting networks and revealing their characteristics.

Less obvious improvements

Another unexpectedly good feature of Mac OS 10.4 is the Grapher utility, which does both two and three dimensional graphing in a useful and attractive way. I may not have enormously much cause to use a graphing calculator these days, but it can be good to play around in an attempt to remember some fraction of what once I knew about trigonometric functions and calculus.

A few welcome improvements have also been made to Safari, though I have yet to open iCal (I use Google Calendar, though iCal would be grabbing the data from there and copying it to my iPod, if my iPod wasn’t broken again), Mail (I use Entourage and GMail), or Address Book (same). The improved PDF functions built into every Print dialog definitely look useful for anyone who does any sort of document publishing or collaboration.

PS. Unrelated to Tiger, but Apple-related: If you call Apple about your broken iPod using a scratchy enough Skype connection, they will call you back at their expense. Since spending time on hold at 30p a minute cell phone fees is among the most tooth-grinding of human experiences, this is good to know.

Hey Tiger… wake up

Now that I have enough RAM to be confident of being able to run Dashboard without making my iBook run like molasses, I picked up a copy of Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) from the UBC Bookstore today. Wish me luck – and no file corruption – for the cross-over. I probably won’t have time to carry out such an operation in Vancouver.

[Update: 6:00pm] Easiest operating system update ever. I started the installer, went for coffee, and came back to find my computer at the login screen. All my files and applications seem to have passed through the transition intact.

[Update: 7:00pm] Existing Tiger users: which widgets do you use, and why?

Yet another one bites the dust

Back in mid-March, the third iPod that I owned began to fail. It was already the replacement for the replacement of the original one, which I purchased in October 2004. The device is the 20GB version of the fourth generation ‘Click Wheel’ iPod. I have rarely done anything wiser than buying the three year extended warranty. Now, the replacement that I got for the third iPod has itself failed: another toasted hard drive, ticking away and unable to be read or written to properly. Not even the program that is meant to restore it to factory settings will work. I suppose anything with moving parts is bound to fail sooner rather than later, but this is getting absurd. The fact that when they replace an iPod, they send you a refurbished one may explain why the failure rate on replacements is so high. Ironically, if the reliability of this iPod had been higher, I would probably be strongly considering buying a new one by now; since it has been so problematic, I am holding off and investigating other options.

People have frequently pointed out that my gadgets tend to fail surprisingly often. In response, I can offer some justifications:

  1. I have more gadgets than most people.
  2. In some cases, I have more finicky gadgets than other people.
  3. The gadgets I have, I use very often.
  4. The environments in which I live are wet.
  5. I am generally aware of exactly how the gadgets I use should work, and it catches my attention immediately when they do not do so.
  6. When I find a fault, I will almost always have it corrected – especially if the gear is under warranty.

While that does explain the frequency of dispatches, somewhat, it remains infuriating to live amidst a stream of little plastic boxes moving towards me and then away again by courier. As long as I have the real essentials: a computer, internet access, and a camera, I cannot really complain.

PS. My parents’ house is surrounded by weird wireless networks. At various times, we though they were coming from our own router, so we named and configured them all. Now there are always at least a couple of networks that look like they are ours, but where we cannot access the configuration page due to a password change. Why would people re-take the networks we accidentally configured, but then keep our esoteric names for them?

Radio communication

I have long found it surprising, and a bit unsettling, to think how many different overlapping radio signals there are surrounding and traversing us at all times. There are all the AM and FM radio stations, cell phones on different frequencies, communications from satellites, broadcast television, military and police radio frequencies, and miscellanous other signals such as aircraft transponders.

Most of that bandwidth is very inefficiently allocated, as with analog phones. Because frequencies have dedicated purposes that are not always being employed, there is a lot of bandwidth that is allocated but unused at any one time. The clever thing about more advanced systems like Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) cellular phones is that they can use dynamically allocated frequency, and thus scale bandwidth according to need.

If we could do the same with some the the excellent bandwidth given over to television or military purposes, large scale wireless internet could come about rather more quickly and easily. Wireless internet, such as it exists now (the 802.1x standards) are located in a really undesirable part of the radio spectrum – hence problems with range and interference. As in so many other cases, the stumbling block is more regulatory than technological.

Thou shalt make backups: frequent and comprehensive

After considerable expenditure of energy, I now have a full duplicate backup of user data from the hard drive of my iBook. I also have no less than eight backups of everything really essential.

I am now… ready to upgrade to Tiger, the latest available version of Mac OS. I am also adding a 1GB stick of RAM to replace the 256 meg extra stick that Apple charged me so much for when I first paid for this computer. I need the extra memory for Photoshop and iPhoto.

Both the Tiger upgrade and the extra RAM will be part of my Vancouver homecoming. It puts my mind at ease to know how many different places academically essential files now reside.

A pocket protector too far

If you have ever felt the urge to take your geek tendencies and just run with them – much like how Macbeth did with his thirst for power – I recommend becoming embroiled in the controversy about the hypothetical atmospheric and biological consequences of a fictional explosion in a film starring Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher – who I prefer to remember as the bazooka-wielding assasin from The Blues Brothers.

Would the destruction of the second Death Star in The Return of the Jedi have inevitably annihalated the ewok race that aids the rebel commando team? Some people say yes. Others say no.

They all have way, way too much time on their hands. The same is true of these people, but at least they have provided me with considerable amusement over the years. Their reviews (1, 2) of recent Star Wars films definitely lay to rest the idea that they could possible be considered consistent or accurate.

This whole discussion was promted by a post on MetaFilter, which I can thank Nick Ellan for addicting me to years ago.

Back to the moon? But why?

Apparently, Lockheed-Martin got the contract to serve as prime contractor for a return to the moon, and possibly further travel from there to Mars. Now, when I first heard the ‘back to the moon’ proposal, I assumed it was electoral fluff. How can an agency that decided to scrap such a useful piece of scientific equipment as the Hubble Space Telescope possibly be considering the scientifically pointless mission of putting human beings back on the moon?

I believe that humanity will eventually expand outwards into space. It is advisable due to the small but catastrophic risk of asteroid or comet impact, as well as generally in keeping with an agenda of exploration that I find personally inspiring. The first moon landings were an astonishing demonstration of human ingenuity and American technical and economic might. With present technology, manned spaceflight is a symbolic and political endeavour, not a scientific one. That said, returning to the moon serves no purpose, scientific or political. If we could do it in the 1960s, we can do it again now. Even if you accept the argument that a moon base is necessary for a manned mission to Mars, the enormous question remains of why we should take on such an expedition at this time, with this technology, and the present financial circumstances of the United States.

When it comes to space science, people are very expensive and delicate instruments. Robots might not always work (note all the failed Mars landers), but they don’t require all the food, air, space, and temperature and acceleration control that people do. The things we hope to learn about our solar system and the space beyond are almost certainly better investigated by robots, at this time. And the moon is hardly a profitable place to go looking for new scientific insights. A robot sent somewhere interesting – like Europa – would almost certainly advance science more than sending scores of people to that great airless ball that lights up our night sky and causes our tides.

This plan is especially absurd given the magnitude of public debt in the United States right now. The existing level of federal debt is more than $8.5 trillion, more than $28,000 per person, and the federal budget is sharply in deficit. If we could choose to send people to the moon instead of developing one of the two hugely expensive fighter jets now being rolled out (the F-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter, a $256 billion program), I would be all for it. At least, going back to the moon would do relatively little harm (wasted resources aside). Of course, no such trade-off is being offered. This would be spending over and above the sums already being expended on pricey little projects like the JSF, the DDX destroyer (about $4 billion per ship), and the war in Iraq (more than $300 billion, so far). The comparison to military hardware is a sensible one, since manned spaceflight is, to a large extent, just another massive subsidy to the military aerospace industry. Hopefully, the passing of the mid-term elections will put this white elephant to sleep again.

Related items:

On digitized books

For years, Project Gutenberg and related endeavours have been seeking to produce digital copies of books that are no longer under copyright. The Gutenberg people have already digitized 17,000. Purposes for doing so include making machine-readable copies available for those with disabilities, allowing for their use with e-book readers, and even in more creative applications – like printing books onto scarves, so that you can read them on flights from the UK to the United States.

In the grand tradition of huge companies incorporating the results of smaller enterprises, many (if not all) of the Gutenberg books are now available through Google Book Search. Figuring out which Jane Austen book a particular passage stuck in your memory is from has thus become a far simpler task. For years, I have been using The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, provided by MIT, to search through plays.

Admittedly, not many people want to sit in front of a monitor to read an entire book. With the development of electronic paper that has high resolution, high contrast, and no requirement for power consumption while displaying static information, perhaps this will all become a whole lot more useful.