Month: October 2007

Blast from the past: hard drives

The computer industry changes so rapidly that it’s easy to forget about the hardware and devices we had just a few years ago. I’ve been cleaning up the office, getting rid of some junk that we’ve had lying around for years, and I’m amazed at some of the hardware I’ve found. Hard drives best demonstrate the difference between then and now – they’ve had the same form factor for years, but the capacities are vastly different.

For instance, the hard drive from an old Toshiba T4900CT laptop is only 810 MB! Technically that’s 770 MB I believe, yes megabytes. I don’t know why I’ve kept this laptop for so long, it hasn’t worked for years. I guess I’m a bit of a digital pack rat. It was the first laptop I ever used. My family used it at the pet store back in Inuvik when I was a kid, and it worked great. I even took it on a field trip back in high school (Dickson reminded me that we played Grand Theft Auto on the bus).

I found this description on the Toshiba Europe site:

The T4900CT and its 75 MHz Pentium processor will give you such speed and power when you’re out on the road that you’ll really move along the data super-highway. Back in the office, there’s hardly a desktop that can keep up with it.

How times have changed! Not only does it weigh about 15 pounds, but it’s a good four inches thick! The last thing that processor makes me think of is speed and power.

Here are a few photos I took tonight: the 810 MB hard drive, a 9.1 GB SCSI hard drive, and a 20.5 GB IDE hard drive.

810 MB hard drive 9.1 GB hard drive 20.5 GB hard drive

I wouldn’t consider buying anything smaller than a 300 GB SATA II hard drive now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that seems tiny in a couple years. Hard to imagine that a hard drive with only 770 MB was ever actually usable!

Notes for 10/28/2007

It feels to me like October has come and gone very quickly! I can’t believe that Halloween is on Wednesday. Oh well. Here are my weekly notes:

Speeding just isn't what it used to be!

Post ImageNormally when I hear someone talking about GPS, I think directions. You know, the gadget you have in your car that tells you where to turn left. Like most electronics however, there are cheap GPS units and top-of-the-line GPS units. Like the one Shaun Malone’s parents installed in his car:

GPS tracking systems like the one in Malone’s car are becoming an increasingly popular way for parents to keep tabs on their kids, an outgrowth of the initial use of such devices in car fleets and trucking. Many consumer-oriented GPS navigation systems also have these capabilities, but Malone’s was hardcore: the system would even e-mail his parents in the event that he drove too fast.

Try explaining that one when you get home! Your parents would know you’re speeding before you do!

Anyway, the great part about this story is that Shaun and his retired sheriff father are using data from the GPS unit to contest a speeding ticket:

While many GPS systems don’t log travel details extensively enough to be used as a defense against a moving violation, Malone’s car was outfitted with a device that could do just that. According to Rude, all recorded plots on Malone’s route show him to be driving under the speed limit.

Kinda takes the fun out of speeding, doesn’t it? I don’t really care if they win their case or not, but I do like it when new technology challenges the status quo!

Who knew GPS units could do so much?!

Read: ArsTechnica

Facebook Day – $15 billion!

Post ImageTo my knowledge there is no "Facebook Day" but that seems like a fitting label for today. Until the company eventually goes public, today is probably the most important day in Facebook’s (incredibly short) history. Today Microsoft announced that it would pay $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook, which means:

The investment values the three-year-old Facebook, which will bring in about $150 million in revenue this year, at $15 billion.

“We are now stepping outside what is typically a business decision,” said Rob Enderle, the founder of the strategy concern Enderle Group. “This was almost personal. I wouldn’t want to be the executive that’s on the losing side at either firm.”

Yes, Facebook is officially worth $15 billion. I wrote in February that Facebook missed the boat by not selling to Yahoo, but also pointed out they’d get another shot. Turns out I was wrong on the first part, and right on the second. All of a sudden Mark Zuckerberg looks like a genius for saying "no thanks" to Yahoo’s paltry offer of $1 billion.

Microsoft and Google were said to be fighting over the deal to the very end, with Microsoft having the slight advantage thanks to a previous ad deal with Facebook. This deal is all about positioning – Microsoft couldn’t afford to let Google cozy up to Facebook’s growing network of eyeballs.

There’s a ton of commentary on this story in the blogosphere, so I won’t rehash that here, but there is one thing that seems odd to me: the amount. No doubt $240 million is a lot of money, but I was expecting an announcement in the billions today. Something more in line with Google’s purchase of YouTube or Microsoft’s purchase of aQuantive.

On the other hand, a smaller piece of a big pie is better than no pie at all.

Read: NYTimes.com

Five Geeky Things I Want To Learn More About

Like lots of other netizens, far too much information passes across my virtual desk in a day. With blogs, TechMeme, Twitter, and dozens of other sites and services, there’s far too many things to process all at once. At the same time, I don’t like missing anything. Usually what I do is bookmark things with del.icio.us, and then review them later. Sometimes those links are unrelated, other times they are part of a larger topic or subject. Here are five such topics:

  1. Silverlight
    Microsoft’s platform for Rich Internet Applications. I’ve checked out demos, examples, overviews, and other general information, but I need to get my hands dirty. I need to create something using Silverlight.
  2. F#
    Another Microsoft item on this list shouldn’t surprise anyone. F# is a functional and object-oriented programming language. I’ve heard many developers say that you should learn one new programming language a year, and F# seems to be worth looking into. Especially since Visual Studio will have full support for it!
  3. SOCAN
    Society of Composers, Artists and Music Publishers of Canada. The link is an Engadget article talking about the SOCAN push for a tax on music downloads here in Canada. I’ve been reading tons about the music industry lately, especially since the Radiohead experiment, but I want to know more about how Canada specifically is affected.
  4. OpenID
    A decentralized, single sign-on system that seems be all the rage these days. I’ve actually played with some code on this one, but I need to devote more energy to it. I want to know how it works with other systems, and where the system is going in the future.
  5. APML
    Attention Profiling Markup Language. Possibly the geekiest thing on this list. Essentially it’s an XML format for sharing your “attention” or “interests”. It enables you to rank your likes and dislikes, and to share that information with other services and applications. I think it could enable some really interesting scenarios if it was used widely enough.

There are dozens of other things I could have mentioned, of course, but these five are particularly interesting to me.

Notes for 10/21/2007

Here are my weekly notes:

  • Went to see We Own The Night this evening. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either.
  • Is piracy destroying the music industry? Hardly. Only sales of CDs are down, everything else is looking up.
  • Edmonton Code Camp was on Saturday! I missed a couple sessions, but the ones I did see were pretty interesting. Here are some photos. I also learned about Launchy from Bil Simser…it’s a nifty little utility! I’ve only had it installed for a little while, but I think I’m really going to like it.
  • Live in Edmonton or Calgary and dying to get an iPhone? Hugh can hook you up.
  • This is hilarious. Inuvik, the small town in the Northwest Territories where I used to live, received 1200 litres of buttermilk by mistake. That’s more than the store, NorthMart, sells in three years!
  • I have a friend who loves fall, a season we don’t usually get for very long here in Edmonton. This year has been pretty good so far, but I’m not sure I like this weather. It’s freezing in the morning, and warm in the afternoon. Kind of annoying.
  • This is an excellent post from Doc Searls on the future of news/newspapers. Definitely worth a read.

Server Maintenance

As some of you know we’ve been in the process of moving our infrastructure for the last couple months to a new data center. Tonight we moved the last of our production servers! As a result, there may have been a couple of hours of down time for some sites (including this one) tonight – apologies for any inconvenience.

Everything looks good right now though, and I’m quite happy that the hard stuff about the move is now behind us. Onward!

Searching Wikipedia Sucks!

Post Image Have you tried searching Wikipedia lately? Don’t bother, because you probably won’t find what you’re looking for! I am continually amazed at how terrible the Wikipedia search results are. Here’s an example of what I mean. Go to Wikipedia, type “al gor” in the search box, and click the search button. You should see something like this. That’s right, the top results are Al-Merrikh, Cy-Gor, Firouzabad, and Kagame Inter-Club Cup.

Absolutely terrible! If you type the same thing in the search box at Google, not only do you get accurate results, but Google prompts you with “Did you mean: al gore”. Why yes, I did! So why is searching Wikipedia so bad?

Part of the problem is that Wikipedia actually has two search modes: “Go” and “Search”. If you type “Al Gore” (spelled correctly) in the box and click Go, you’re taken right to the entry about Al Gore. If you instead click Search, you’re taken to a list of articles that contain or reference “Al Gore”. You can read more about searching Wikipedia here. So they’ve sort of complicated things by including two buttons instead of just one. The Go button is useful when you know the name of the article you want, but useless otherwise.

The other part of the problem is that the search algorithm just plain sucks. I know they don’t have a lot of resources, but you’d think that one of the most popular websites on the web could have a decent search feature. Matching “al gor” with “al gore” is a problem that has been solved for years, yet Wikipedia doesn’t even come close to accomplishing it!

Wikipedia itself mentions external search engines as a way to find what you’re looking for, but they aren’t really much better. For instance, if you type “al gor” at the special Google search for Wikipedia page, you do get the correct Al Gore entry as the first result, but the rest are not relevant at all.

So here’s where we’re at. Google knows that if you type “al gor” you probably mean “Al Gore”. Wikipedia knows about all of the entries that reference “Al Gore”. What we need is a way to combine the two! Is that really so much to ask?

If you know of a better way to search Wikipedia, please let me know!

Make elections greener – Internet voting!

Today is election day here in Edmonton. Today is also Blog Action Day. Better together? Let’s find out! It should be pretty clear that election day means we’re voting for our city mayor, councillors, and school board trustees, but what is Blog Action Day all about? From the website:

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

This is my entry for Blog Action Day, and as you may have guessed by now, I am going to talk about the election in relation to the environment. I just heard on the news that the turnout for this election is expected to be an abysmal 20%. Are people really not interested, or is it just too difficult to vote? Maybe a bit of both, but the process can certainly be made simpler. Not to mention more environmentally friendly or green.

There are two major problems with the way we vote now:

  1. So much paper is wasted. There are forms to organize the volunteers. There are forms to register you. The ballot you fill out. The second ballot you fill out because you screwed up on the first one. The documents with results. You get the idea. Voting today is really not an environmentally friendly thing to do. And don’t forget the campaigns either – thousands and thousands of flyers, posters, signs, etc.
  2. It’s too difficult. I worked from 9 to 5 today, and it took me until 6 PM to get back to the area of the city I live in to vote. So I didn’t have much time at all considering the polls close at 8 PM. Not only that, but once you get to the voting station you have to deal with three dinosaurs before you even get a ballot. Seriously, why do three individuals have to look at my drivers license in order to let me vote? Isn’t one person good enough? I’m not kidding about the dinosaurs part either. I was easily the youngest person in the room by about 35 years. It’s great that they are helping out, but they move slowly, have to squint at the fine print on the drivers license, and worst of all they look at me like they’ve never seen someone under 40 going to vote (and of course they must comment on that too). Just let me get in and get out!

It doesn’t have to be this way! We could make elections more environmentally friendly and efficient by getting rid of the archaic system we use now and adopting Internet voting. There are of course examples of successes with Internet voting and concern over potential problems that may arise. I won’t get into any of that here, but you can read the very complete Wikipedia entry if you’re interested. I simply look at it this way:

  • Is the Internet good enough for Revenue Canada and the banks? Yes.
  • Would voting over the Internet have a positive impact on the environment? Yes.
  • Would voting over the Internet be faster and easier for voters than the current process? Yes.

Good enough for me. I think it’s time we moved one of our society’s most important institutions into the 21st century. I think it’s time we started voting over the Internet!

Notes for 10/14/2007

Here are my weekly notes:

  • The RestorAction Charity Gala last night was a major success! The signed Oilers jersey ended up going for $675. I’ll have pictures up as soon as I get my camera back from Sharon.
  • Tomorrow is Blog Action Day! “One issue. One Day. Thousands of voices.” The topic tomorrow is the environment. If you’re a blogger you should totally take part!
  • Also tomorrow is Edmonton’s municipal election. I was out yesterday morning dropping flyers for George Rice, my former principal, who is running in Ward G for the Public School Trustee position. I live in Ward G, so I’ll obviously be voting for him! Get out and vote!
  • With Al Gore winning the Nobel, I expected the chatter about a potential presidential bid to increase. Didn’t expect the commentary to suggest a run is less likely now though! This article and this article explain things quite well.
  • Interesting post from Nick Carr on the topic of super-inexpensive storage. The example he uses is definitely not typical, but it nonetheless illustrates that utility data storage (like S3) is really, really affordable. Now we just need other utility services to follow!
  • TechCrunch noted that the one year anniversary of GooTube was this past week.
  • Marshall Kirkpatrick says that Twitter is paying his rent! Essentially Marshall is finding that stories break on Twitter first. I’ve started getting the majority of my news through Twitter too.

Music
My favorite song at the moment is The Pretender by Foo Fighters. Such a wicked track! Some other songs I’ve been enjoying: Hot by Avril Lavigne, How Far We’ve Come by Matchbox Twenty, Foundations by Kate Nash, and Say Goodbye To Love by Kenna. Oh and Gimme More by Britney Spears, which I commented about this week:

Enjoying Britney’s track “Gimme More”…Britney is like Michael Jackson…enjoy the music, ignore the person.