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Thursday, July 18, 2002 |
The Register: JPEGs are not free: Patent holder pursues IP grab. A video conferencing company based in Austin, Texas says it's going to pursue royalties on the transmission of JPEG images. And it's already found a licensee: Sony Corporation. Formerly known as VTEL, Forgent Networks acquired Compression Labs in 1997, acquiring this patent into the bargain. [Tomalak's Realm]
6:37:30 PM 
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Ask the pilot. Do airlines cut down the flow of oxygen in the cabin to save fuel? Can wind shear rip off a plane's wing? [Salon.com]
Wow! What an engrossing column! Worth the time to read, I learned a lot about flying.
6:33:59 PM
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Really Early Journals
Looking for 18th and 19th century journals? Check out The Internet Library of Early Journals at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/ . This site is a joint project by the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford. The goal is to digitize "substantial runs" of
18th and 19th century journals, and make these images available on the Internet, together with their associated bibliographic data.
Journals include: Gentleman's Magazine, The Annual Register, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Notes and Queries, The Builder, and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. You can currently search on Blackwood's, Gentleman's, Notes and Queries, and Philosophical Transaction. Each title is separately searchable.
Searching is very basic -- a couple of query boxes and a Boolean connector. Searching Gentleman's for "shipping" found seven results. Results include the date and volume of the issue and the phrase containing your keyword. Click on the date of the issue and you'll be given a picture of the relevant page. Icons on the top left of the page allow you to flip back and forth or zoom in on a page. I found the pages much more readable than I would have expected, though occasionally page fade makes reading almost impossible. (The page fade on the pages I saw appears to be mostly on the lower right.)
PermaLink
4:12:59 PM
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Stretchable Keyboard for Mobile Devices.
The First Truly One-size-fits-all Keyboard?
 "RAST Associates recently announced a new keyboard for mobile devices. The Vario Keyboard has five rows of keys arranged in a standard layout. What makes this keyboard different is that it's made mostly of fabric and rubber, and it stretches to different sizes and configurations.
In it's most compact form, the Vario Keyboard is about the size of a postcard, small enough to slip unobtrusively into a pocket. The keyboard weights less than eight ounces, a bit lighter than the popular ThinkOutside Stowaway....
The keyboard is contained in an expandable, spring-loaded case. While RAST Associates plans to license it to device manufacturers, who can then fashion custom connectors or cables for it - again, like ThinkOutside's Stowaway - the keyboard will also communicate with other devices via existing wireless standards. Bluetooth and 802.11b are already supported.
RAST Accociates made no mention of pricing or availability, although they did say that the Vario Keyboard would be 'competitive with other mobile keyboard devices on the market.' " [infoSync]
Come to mama! Now imagine if it also worked with your smartphone, OQO, etc. While I like the idea of integrating the input method into the device itself, this would work with any of your devices which is more efficient in the long run (at least until we have real voice recognition).
[The Shifted Librarian]
Between this and the OQO, you would have the better part of a mobile workstation that you take with you everywhere. Add in a couple of USB keychain drives, a wireless mouse of some sort, and you could have all your mobile needs met.
What would be great is if the keyboard charged itself while it was plugged in, and ran off the batteries while wireless. Also, having some way to choose which device you were entering data into would be good as well. Cool Tech! [Ryan Greene's Radio Weblog]
3:56:38 PM
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The WSJ has an article about how to get started blogging. A reader forwarded me the article via email. I saved it into my upstream folder. It worked. Hey he's using Manila for his weblog. That's very cool. [Scripting News]
This is interesting to me as I have been thinking about ways of sharing TV shows between friends recently. One of the big things I would love to be able to do is send a friend a show, or else have it either on me or accessible to me at a moment's notice.
Example:
Person 1: "Were you watching Discovery over the weekend?"
Person2: "No, what'd I miss?"
Person 1: "Aw man, they had this show on sea monsters, you'd have loved it!"
Person2: "Really? You have it handy?"
Person 1: "Sure, hold on" Pulls out device, selects show in question, hooks into entertainment system and BOOM their watching it.
Person2: "Amazing! Thanks for tagging that for me!"
Person 1: "No problem."
I want to be able to tape a show that I just missed, or caught the last five minutes of. Basically, I want video on demand, with a PBS like advertising interface on the shows that I choose to store locally. No ads for other programs, no commercial interruptions, just me and the show, and I can pause it when I want. I want to be able to take my shows with me, and send them to friends as well.
"But Ryan," you say, "just buy a Tivo." Yeah, Tivos are extremely cool, and I am planning on buying one soon, but I want something that I can take with me wherever I go, and show the program to anyone I want.
While I could scratch build something, using the Bluetooth Pocket Server, a video capture card, and a SAN/media server combo with some gigabit ethernet thrown in for good measure, I'd rather buy a functional package that does everything I want, so I don't have to trouble the whole shebang. [Ryan Greene's Radio Weblog]
3:54:31 PM
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A Gadget King Lives by His Own Devices. Scott A. Jones has always liked the idea of being wired; his English Tudor-style home, outside Indianapolis, is dedicated to that idea. By John Leland. [New York Times: Technology]
Contrast this with my last post: This gentleman has a house that he is using as a testbed for a lot of the tech that I have gone on about. Touchscreen controls for the home systems, fingerprint biometrics for the doors. He's willing to live with the bugs in the system:
Locks with fingerprint sensors didn't recognize his children because their hands were dirty. "I've been locked out of the bedroom for a day," he said. "I've had no idea how to turn off lights in a room. Fireplaces won't go off. Gates open and close with a mind of their own. My maid had a horrible time getting into my bedroom."
In fact, he's got a CIO for his home to keep everything running smoothly. He also runs a set of companies that develops and markets the tech that he's living with. While the products are cool, they also come with a steep price, the 200 disc DVD manager is $7,500. I think I can live with getting up and walking across the room for that price.
Regardless, it is cool to see someone who is willing to make things better by really living with the tech as an effort to get it to improve. [Ryan Greene's Radio Weblog]
3:53:33 PM
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New Blogger With a Rant.
You know how I love my rants. :) Welcome new blogger Darrel Miller. He posted a rant today to the Off Topic mailing list, then posted it to his web log:
From a press release by Epicor[1]:
"Web services allow for dynamic integration between applications without costly and time-consuming programming."
Wow, I guess before long they won't be needing our services any more.
Subscribed, welcome, and good job. :)
Link Discuss [The .NET Guy]
3:49:25 PM
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Water baloons in space. Did you ever wonder what it would be like to pop a water balloon in space? NASA did.
The tests were conducted in part to develop the ability to rapidly deploy large liquid drops by rupturing an enclosing membrane. And they've some marvelous result videos to show for it. [raelity bytes]
3:42:14 PM
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How Long Until The Library Of Congress Fits On Your Keychain?.
This is the one I've been waiting for: FujiFilm Unveils Tiny Hard Drive (emphasis is mine)
 "FujiFilm is helping revive Sneakernet with the release of its straightforwardly named USB Drive, the newest in a growing array of pocket-size, large-capacity storage devices that easily move among PCs.
This small flash RAM 'drive' is available in sizes ranging from 32MB to 128MB, with a 256MB version expected out in the fall. The 32MB drive costs $50; the 64MB unit, $70; and the 128MB drive, $150. Fuji initially announced 8MB and 16MB versions, too, but isn't shipping them because apparently no one wants them.
The unit's physical size, not its capacity, will catch people's attention. Forget the proverbial pack of cards or cigarettes. Measuring less than 4 by 1 by 1 inches, the USB Drive more closely resembles a short, stubby marker or a fat electric thermometer with a nose that plugs directly into your computer's USB port. It weighs only 0.7 ounce and is powered by the USB port, so there's no need for a battery or AC adapter.
Besides being small and light, it offers real plug and play--not the usual process (plug in, install the driver, identify driver conflicts that keep it from working, update the driver over the Internet, and finally hope it plays). That's because the FujiFilm Drive comes with a built-in processor that lets it work (in many cases) without drivers....
...And unlike Archos's MiniHD 20GB, the USB Drive works driver-free with USB 1.0 as well as 2.0....
But it won't work that way with everything. The drive still requires drivers for Windows 98 and Mac OS 8.6, which are the earliest versions of those operating systems that it supports. (And yes, you can use it to share data between PCs and Macs.)" [PC World]
Suh-weet!
I find it particularly interesting that Fuji found out no one wants 8MB and 16MB storage devices. When I had my first Palm III, I lusted for 8MB, but nowadays that's nothing. In fact, I wouldn't even consider buying one of these USB devices until the 256MB version is available. What's the equivalent of Moore's law for storage?
Addendum: the Fuji USB Drive site shows it available in a 512MB version!! [The Shifted Librarian]
3:40:02 PM
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I just visited a very interesting site called "did you ever wonder?". Some of the topics included "How to rebuild the surface of a cell?", "How soil keeps the world in balance?", "About the invisible marvels of the nanoworld?", and "How to carve with light?". Each month the site features new questions and new personalities.
I discoved the site in the Scout Report, which I have been reading the every weekend for quite a few years. It is really excellenet. The Scout Report is a weekly publication offering a selection of new and newly discovered Internet resources of interest to researchers and educators. However, anyone is welcome to subscribe to one of the mailing lists (plain text or HTML).
The Scout Report provides a short summary about each new link. There are three categories: Research and Education, General Interest, and Network Tools. In the pre-Google days I would add a link or two that I thought was particularly interesting every week to the Favorite Places section of my web site. It grew to more than 1,000 links and it is organized into a dozen categories with additional sub-categories. I still get emails from people saying they find it useful. I am sure there are some broken links there but I do my best to keep the old ones pruned out and add some new ones.
Related links...
Current issue of the Scout Report
The Internet Scout Weblog [John Patrick's Weblog]
3:20:21 PM
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 Create your own Venn Diagram:  Check out a database of Venn Diagrams, and use the Web-based interface to create your own. This is quite nifty. [Venn Diagram]
[GranneWeb]
3:14:02 PM
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ShowCode
Here's a neat little utility for those of us posting .NET sample code. It takes C#, VB.Net, SQL, ASPX/ASAX code and creates color-coded HTML code. I'm going to play around with it and get all of my samples updated. [Wrinkled Paper]
3:06:25 PM
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I have played a little with Mikel Maron new myRadio tool. Also if it's still in an early release stage, it looks incredibly promising. It starts solving the problem of too many channels in the news aggregator. I organized my feeds in 4 different pages (evectors, blogs, italians, news) and now everything is much less cluttered and since the GUI is very similar to my.yahoo it's somehow familiar. This is definely a very important piece for the future of Radio news aggregator. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
2:59:43 PM
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Jobs for humans/jobs for computers.
My latest distraction from doing real work is Brown & Duguid - The Social Life of Information. I'm justifying it on the basis that it contains quite a lot of comment on similar issues to those I'm dealing with in my thesis, and it looks like fertile ground for quote harvesting.
For a start, and further to my earlier post on turning people into machines, there's this:
These technologies are quite remarkable, but what they do remarkably is very different from what humans do. They are thus not on the same road. Indeed, their great advantage comes from their complementarity: Where people are clumsy, bots are often adept. But equally, where people are adept, bots are often clumsy. [p. XII]
My own view on this is that the maximum value can be extracted from fine grained interaction between people and software - the software should provide a range of tools which can be readily used in the process of discovery, thinking, assesment that people do. There are all sorts of things that go into this, but one thing is certain: as soon as you try to create a piece of software to "automate the process" then you're on dangerous ground. Software should take on the grunt work, and allow the human maximum flexibility in following up ideas and whims. [Hamish's Hydroinformatics Weblog]
2:39:27 PM
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Making the point 
Hi-Fli
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...operating devices that emit RF on a commercial flight is typically forbidden. The more likely outcome of embedding Wi Fi in every notebook computer is a ban on computer use while in flight. We can't expect flight attendents to be up on which notebook has Wi Fi and which doesn't. The typical big biz response would be to simplify the matter and ban them all. |
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Someone out there that knows aviation electronics care to comment? |
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I know a little about RF, and about the kind of RF used by airplanes for navigation and for communication between planes and control towers. And while I think the situation is complicated, I don't think it's hopeless either for Internet service on planes, or for wi-fi (which is already there, frankly — more about that later). |
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First let's talk about interference. |
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Ever try to listen to a radio next to your computer? AM radio is nearly trashed. FM is in much better shape, but some radios are more immune to noise than others. Tune your Walkman to a weak signal, set it by your laptop and see what happens. |
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What's interesting here is that your laptop is putting out plenty of noise, even without a wi-fi signal. |
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Now try this one: tune a radio to an empty channel at the upper end of the FM band. Take 107.1, for example. Now take another radio, such as a walkman, and tune it back and forth between 96 and 97 on the dial. Around 96.4 or 96.6 you'll hear a blank signal on 107.1. That's because most radios are busy transmitting while they're also receiving. And they're doing it at frequencies about 10.7 or 10.5 MHz away from the channel to which they are tuned. Don't ask why; it's just the way most FM radios have been built for the duration. It's why you'll sometimes notice that SCAN on your car radio will stop at a station that has exactly nothing on it. That's because a car nearby is tuned to a station 10.x MHz up or down the dial. (Using a similar technique you can actually do non-invasive research into TV viewing and radio listening.) |
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Now look at the FAA's list of aviation frequency bands. Note all the radionavigation stuff between 108 and 118. Air/Ground communications (what United Airlines often shares on Channel 9 of the armrest audio system) starts at 118. These are all frequencies that your walkman can conceivably interfere with if you listen to FM on the plane (which is very easy to do, especially if you're sitting by a window). In fact, a few years ago PC Computing magazine did a test on a variety of devices, including laptops, portable radios and game players, and found that only walkman-type radios were a conceivable threat. But that was long before wi-fi was huge. Or even digital cellular telephony. |
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European cell phones use bands around 900 and 1800MHz. U.S. bands are around 800 and 1900MHz. Microwave ovens, Bluetooth and wi-fi are all up around 2400-2500MHz. There's aviation stuff near these bands, but not on them. |
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Now it's looking like the FCC will open up bands upwards of 2400MHz (2.4Ghz) for spread spectrum, frequency hopping and other techniques that will allow broadband communications to your laptops and other devices. |
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I think that's when the Internet shows up on commercial aircraft. |
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The dirty not-so-secret (it's actually a Good Thing) is that, as frequencies go up, the waves get stopped or absorbed by smaller and smaller things (though they might still be reflected by bigger ones — it all depends). Think of it in terms of sound. Play music in your living room and go around the corner into another room, then another room again. What you lose first are the highest treble sounds. As you get farther away all you'll hear is the deepest bass. Same goes with lightning and thunder. Lightning causes thunder. If you're nearby, you hear a loud crack, or a tearing sound followed by a boom. (In the latter case you're actually hearing the sound produced along the length of a liightning bolt striking nearby, where the sound produced by the bottom of the bolt arrives first, and the boom produced by the spreading roots of the bolt in the cloud above arrive last, but loudest because they're produced by a part of the bolt that's parallel to the ground.) But if you're far away you only hear a low boom or a deep rumble. Higher frequencies degrade over shorter distances. |
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The powers used by wi-fi and the new higher-frequency spread spectrum stuff are extremely low, and the frequencies are extremely high. They're also fairly isolated from the frequencies used by planes. The only thing close to the new 5.7 GHz spread spectrum band is TWDR (Terminal Doppler Weather Radar), which uses 5.6-5.65GHz. I don't think that's an issue. |
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So I'm betting that the FAA is quietly monitoring the wi-fi situation. They'd be dumb not to, considering how many laptops come with wi-fi already. |
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The problem I have with the article is when Lou quotes Gartner wonk Joseph Byrne, "For example, you and I can swap files while sitting next to each other on a plane". |
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Yeah, right. Right after I get to place a call to my wife on my cell phone. |
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Well, this is already do-able, among Macintosh laptop users, and probably plenty of Windows and Linux users as well. I can make my laptop into a base station very a few clicks, and exchange files willy-nilly with any takers. I am sure lots of files have been passed back and forth in planes already, with nobody the wiser. | The clue train seems to be stopping there.
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David Reed: "I'm really excited by what may be starting to happen at the FCC." | A little humility, please
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Never mind what Google says, N.Z. Bear has me pegged as a lowly insect in the Blogosphere Ecosystem. Not sure what I used to be. Living ooze or something. | The wandering optimist
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The American identity can be summarised in a single polling question: we are the only country in the world where a majority has consistently believed - with the exception of a few years in the late 1970s - that next year will be better. Such optimism must seem obnoxious to the rest of the world, especially when accompanied by overwhelming military and commercial power. The essential American credulousness - we believe in our nation, our system, our sensibility (those who demur usually do so on the grounds that we are not living up to our ideals), we even tend to believe in God - must seem pretty obnoxious, too. | PointPower
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Blogging presentations live is a terrific new sport. I'm not sure if anybody was playing it when I gave this presentation to JabberConf in Munich last month, but bringing it up is an excuse to finally put it up, which I just did a few minutes ago. |
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And what the heck: here's most of another presentation I gave to a group assembled by Lance Knobel in London a few days later. It opens with my wireless adventures there. Still a fun story. |
Your loss
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Took my laptop in for an HD and memory upgrade yesterday. The guy behind the counter knew who I was and asked if I'd heard of Blog Wars. (Don't click yet. Keep reading.) "You mean warblogs?" Nope, he said. Blog Wars. "Watch out," he added. "It's really over the top." |
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More like it's really under the bottom. The site is flat-out pornographic. But not a porn site. I mean, it doesn't open 40 windows you can't close or anything like that. It is kind of a Slashdot for sex and gross-out topics. There are a few nuggets like this link to a bizarre idea for WTC2. But... man, there's some nasty shit on there. |
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Anyway, click at your own risk. | [Doc Searls Weblog]
2:36:01 PM
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Amazon API. Cool, Amazon releases their a web service API! Interfaces to the Amazon API are an rpc/encoded SOAP endpoint described with WSDL and a raw XML over HTTP endpoint described using XML schemas & prose. Savvy move. There are already some quite interesting uses of the API: BookWatch combines RSS, the Google API and the Amazon API; and Similarities Graph creates diagrams of the similarities between books. For fun, check out the Similarities Graph for C# Essentials. When looking at the API one thing I noticed was both the WSDL and XSDs type everything as string even if a more specific schema type exists. For example, in the SOAP API /Details/ImageUrlSmall is typed as xs:string, I would have expected this to be xs:anyURI. Any thoughts on why they chose this route? [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] I would also love to see the date of release to be typed as date, but I agree with Sam: they took the least common denominator (LCD) approach to maximize interop. I just wonder, when will be the time when we don't need to think about LCD to interop? Seems like I still have a lot of work to do with SOAP::Lite. [toolbox]
12:49:13 PM
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First Monday: After the Dot-Bomb. Described below are some "pet peeves," some problem areas identified in the design of Web information retrieval to date. These problems are accompanied by suggested solutions, or, at least, directions to go in to develop solutions for the next round of Web information retrieval development. [Tomalak's Realm]
12:47:21 PM
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FirstGov opens for business. The U.S. government announces it will open an online auction and shopping section on its FirstGov portal, consolidating sales of property, cars, books, gifts and government auctions. [CNET News.com]
10:43:48 AM
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Blogs as external brain packs.
Wired: "Seniors in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, with mild to moderate memory loss, are writing weblogs to help them make sense of their daily lives. And the activity, they say, is slowing the onset of their symptoms." [Scripting News]
» This is such a fantastic idea.
It does, however, raise some serious security issues. At the moment there is no real trust issue with what goes in a weblog. But if someone is really going to treat a weblog as their external brain pack then their going to have to be sure that no-one can tamper with it, thereby altering their perceived reality.
It puts me in mind of the Christopher Nolan film Memento (with Guy Pierce).
[Curiouser and curiouser!]
I think it would also be a good tool to allow seniors a way to create their own little 'book' of their life.
9:09:29 AM
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Minimalist Web Project. This is a collection of good-looking websites that are built with minimalism in mind, the idea of beauty through 'less is more.' I started this project June 27th, 2002 by posting a 'matchmaker' project on Kaliber 10000 and allowing people to submit all other sites. I started the list by posting 3 of the sites listed below, Pseudofamous, 37 Signals and Fifth Third Bank, and all others have been submitted by those who are fans of HTMLminimalism. [xBlog: Visual thinking linking | XPLANE]
8:57:18 AM
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Japan, a Preview of Coming Attractions?. CNN Money -- For years, the Japan question has come up only to be quickly swatted down. There's no way we'd let our economy languish for 12 years like the Japanese have, said the optimists. This is America, and when we've got a problem we fix it. But a June paper from the Federal Reserve titled, "Preventing Deflation: Lessons from Japan's Experience in the 1990's," has got the U.S.-is-Japan worries revving again. The comparison isn't hard to draw. Japan had a bubble, the United States had a bubble. Japan's banks are unwilling to lend to businesses despite low interest rates, and U.S. banks are increasingly unwilling to lend despite low interest rates. And now the Fed paper raises a worry that the same deflationary forces that have helped prevent a Japanese recovery could happen in the United States too. (07/17/02) [Synergic Earth News]
8:51:03 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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