computers: one billion bytes of RAM isn’t enough

Posted on 2011-04-25 by skierpage

I’m typing this on a Falcon Northwest top-of-the-line desktop computer. It’s from 2004. The Athlon 3000 dual core CPU can keep up with most of my needs, the 100GB disk has enough space, the audio is fine, the video can display a large desktop.  Latest 3D in the browser doesn’t work, but day-to-day surfing and video playback is fine.

The killer problem is its memory. 1 GB of RAM ( 8,000 times the RAM of my Macintosh 128kB!) is no longer enough to surf the web. Far from setting us free from the tyranny of updating our computers, browsing has become the most demanding application we run, unless you’re a 3D video editor.

  • I’ve abandoned Firefox and Thunderbird to revert to the integrated Mozilla suite SeaMonkey (the continuation of the original Netscape Navigator suite) so that I only have one monster program using up all my RAM.
  • I’ve limited the amount of memory that any program can consume (ulimit -v 1360000) to try to make Firefox/SeaMonkey crash faster when it runs out of memory.
  • I’ve disabled some of the KDE desktop services such as its desktop semantic search and central contacts/e-mail manager (thereby making the desktop even more of an irrelevant “programs strip at the bottom below the browser (and terminal window) where I do all my real work ”

Nothing helps.  If I open more than about 7 tabs, or if one of them is “aggressive”, I wait for my computer to lock up.

It should be easy to solve this problem, just buy three 1GB sticks of PC3200 memory. But 7-year old memory is quite expensive, about $50 a slot.  Best Buy has a deal on memory I’ve never heard to get 2GB for $60.  So as usual, buying a top-of-the-line computer for a lot of money doesn’t avoid obsolescence, it just postpones it.  A quality computer will work for years, but after a few years it’ll be off the pace and upgrading it will be expensive. It’s better to buy a cheaper computer and get a new one every three years, or sooner if it breaks.

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books: Richard Ford’s dispassionate adultery misses his peak

Posted on 2011-04-22 by skierpage

far from his best

Jan 01, 2011 by skierpage

A Multitude of Sins

★★☆☆☆ Richard Ford‘s short story The Womanizer in book 40 of the Granta literary magazine knocked me out, perhaps my favorite modern short story until The God of War came along , so I got this book. Alas no story in the collection comes close, they’re all variations on his lesser The Shore in Granta 50: adulterous man in a cool relationship doesn’t recognize how bad he is.

This hReview brought to you by the hReview Creator.

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books: a dull book about design

Posted on 2011-04-22 by skierpage

Just terrible

Apr 22, 2004 by skierpage

Small Things Considered

★☆☆☆☆ One of the lamest books I’ve ever read. Henry Petroski rambles on about the design of supermarkets, toothbrush holders, stair treads, potato peelers and his Volvo’s cupholders, but there’s minimal historical research or thinking involved. Apart from a section on paper bag design, the trite conclusion of every chapter is the same as the book’s subtitle Why there is no perfect design.

This hReview brought to you by the hReview Creator.

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web: Amazon Cloud music, digits online, and piracy

Posted on 2011-03-29 by skierpage

Amazon’s Cloud Drive/Cloud Music Player is intriguing. It lets you play music from an online storage folder. It’s easy for Amazon to implement since they already have all the music files, so the millionth user with a hit song doesn’t take an extra 3MB of storage, just another pointer to one copy of Lady_Gaga_Born_This_Way_240kbps_high.mp3. Amazon will offer this for every MP3 you buy from them, so it’s a competitive feature for their music store against the iTunes juggernaut.

It’s a kick in the pants for Google that Amazon beat them to it:

Google has nearly all the pieces to do the same: I can already upload music files to Google Docs, Google has a checkout and an Android app store. I’m sure it’s a humiliating wakeup call that Amazon got there first. Google Docs even has the nifty “Share” feature, though enabling it for music would trigger yet another epic legal battle.[me on Slashdot]

I’m a very minor pirate, I don’t think I’ve ever pirated something that wasn’t freely made available to me or that I can legally purchase. But it’s fascinating to imagine the ways that companies’ control over 1s and 0s can be subverted (my thoughts on pictures) thanks to their innate fluidity and infinite replicatability. Here Amazon is letting me access my music from any device anywhere. My.MP3.com tried something similar and was sued into oblivion. But you don’t need a company to provide this service, and who is “me” exactly? When it comes to digital files,

The benefits to storing your music collection online are so great that many people must already be doing it, including the intersection of rich and record collector. Karl Lagerfeld must get tired of lugging his Louis Vuitton trunk-ful of iPods around, I’m sure Elton John is back to acquiring vinyl, I doubt Music Man Murray is going to delete the MP3s of his 300,000 records.

I don’t see what’s illegal in storing your legally-purchased music in your own online storage. I don’t think the record companies can force you to keep the username and password of your online music folder private, any more than your car company can force you to lock your car up. The reason people don’t share a read-only password is they’d have to pay their ISP big bandwidth fees when huge crowds come to freeload. But the rich can afford it. When will some celebrity, Russian oligarch or Chinese billionaire, mad at the record companies and eager for infamy, go anarchist value-destroying Robin Hood for us and let slip that the username:password for http://RomanAbramovich.ru/AllMyMusic is boris:Chelsea ?[me on Slashdot]

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art and excess: $1M Red Tibetan Mastiff vs. Jeff Koons’ Puppy

Posted on 2011-03-17 by skierpage

A multi-millionaire coal baron in China just bought “Big Splash”, a red Tibetan Mastiff, for $1.5 million because “they have become highly-prized status symbols for China’s new rich.” The dogs are thought to be a pure “Chinese” breed and they are rarely found outside Tibet, giving them an exclusivity that other breeds cannot match. Translation: this mobile conversation piece is a sickly inbred dog from the mother of all “bubble breeds” Compared with most pure breeds, mutts from the pound are the six million dollar man: stronger, smarter, longer-lived. Genetic diversity rules.

Big Splash’s weird color and 180-lb heft will impress other billionaires , but is no match for Jeff Koon’s “Puppy,” a sui generis symbol, according to Koons, of “love, warmth and happiness”. One of the litter costs Stephanie Seymour’s ex-husband $100,000 a year in flowers to maintain. I love this  this non-review of “Puppy” by Peter Schjeldah in The New Yorker:

I remember my first encounter, in Germany, in 1992, with Koons’s famous “Puppy,” the forty-three-foot-high Scottie dog enveloped in living flowers. As I was judiciously taking descriptive and analytical notes, a bus arrived bearing a group of severely disabled children in wheelchairs. They went wild with delight. Abruptly feeling absurd, I shut my notebook and took instruction from the kids’ unequivocal verdict.

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software: Google/Android doesn’t know how to link

Posted on 2011-02-01 by skierpage

(I wanted this in Thunderbird, now I long for it in Google apps and Android.) 18 years ago, before there was HTML and http, the Perspective personal information manager software could take the text lunch tomorrow with John at Monk's and create a calendar appointment linking to the Bob Smith and Monk’s coffee shop records in my address book. Now computers are 250,000 times faster, UIs can autofill a dropdown list of every web site or common search term as fast as I type each letter of Lady Gag…, we have O.S. and network level APIs to link anything with anything.  So how do Google apps compare with decades-old technology?

Calendar event (meet John Smith)
Nothing!  Desktop Calendar’s Quick add feature even taunts you with its “Example: Dinner with Michael 7pm tomorrow but it parses 7pm tomorrow and ignores the Michael sitting in your contacts list.  I can add his e-mail as a guest of the event, but that generates e-mails and invitations to him; this is information for me, not social networking or some sort of eVite wanna-be party planner.
Call alarm (phone John Smith 10:20 Wednesday)
Sanyo dumb phones have had call alarms for over a decade.  You create one in the contacts or calendar app, and at the scheduled time you get an alert with a big button that you can click to place the call. Android has no such facility, either implicitly by typing this or explicitly by clicking [New call alarm]. Instead those words are meaningless to it, so when the event notification goes off it makes me screw around going between apps and re-typing. I’ve already given it the action and the data, it’s just too stupid to realize it.
Task list (discuss project with John Smith)
(Tasks are a feature in desktop GMail and Calendar, but they don’t show up in Android 2.2) Nothing! No way to go from the text to the contact, no way to tie them.
Maps (John Smith)
Good! As I type a dropdown shows matching names from Contacts with their locations
Event location (Monk's coffee shop)
Unlike Maps, Calendar doesn’t autocomplete from all my contacts with locations, nor does it show recent map locations. And since Calendar doesn’t realize I’m meeting John Smith, I can’t even tell it the location is his home address that’s sitting in contacts. And when I later tap/click the location to show it in Maps, Maps doesn’t consult my address book as it does while I’m typing, it only does a dumb web search. It’s a quadruple fail!

A wiki allows you to easily make explicit links of this sort using simple markup; if you write meet [[John Smith]] at [[Monk's Coffee shop]] it will turn the things in square brackets into hyperlinks to those wiki pages, whether they exist or not. And wiki pages have “What links here” to expose the connections, or you can go semantic web and assign meet_with: and location: properties to the links. That doesn’t seem Google’s style, but they can do the instant drop-down thing; as you type the app should opportunistically look for matches with contacts, and if you auto-complete not only save you typing the rest of …k's coffee shop, but establish a bidirectional link between the event, event location, or task and the contact. Far from doing this, Android text fields instead autocorrect names that are in Contacts, turning Pastine into “Pastime”.

Software that did the right thing was available decades ago, so why are computers getting worse at understanding?

“call John Smith”
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web: Why is there Facebook at all?

Posted on 2011-01-12 by skierpage

Social networking sites are weird. All they do is host shared bits of data between groups of people they mislabel as “friends”. But why on earth do we store our  private thoughts, pictures, and information on a central site that hands all this over to marketers and government agencies? For decades we’ve sent e-mail privately amongst ourselves, yet dress communication up slightly differently as a status update and some comments, and we uncritically hand everything over to Mark Zuckerberg.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We should all be doing direct person-to-person social networking.  Your toaster cable modem, wireless router, or smartphone is powerful enough to send and receive encrypted pictures, status updates, and comments to/from lists of people you control, then your browser can assemble your own “Top News” page from the bits of data. The data is independent of the presentation, so you could have some browser pages (call them “web apps”, but you don’t need a network connection) that show messages and responses, others that show a visual timeline, others that show all the links… The great thing about this is that if your computer crashes, your toaster cheap networked gizmo can just contact all your associates and reassemble the pictures, comments, messages you’ve shared with them.

Together we can kill Facebook, we just need to zz[CONTENT DELETED BY mzuckerberg~~~privilegesTerminated]

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computers: I want to be browser-based

Posted on 2010-12-10 by skierpage

Google’s ChromeOS “nothing but web” replacement for the heavyweight PC environment is nearing release, though overshadowed by Android’s unstoppable rise for smart phones and tablets and Google TV. I wish Firefox and the Linux distributions would proceed with similar initiatives. As I wrote regarding Google’s announcement of a pilot program involving their own-brand notebook :

I’d love to run even more stuff in the browser. I hate that I access most resources through bookmarks and the browser’s smart location field, but other resources I have to go through the GUI toolkit’s file “browser”, and then launch external apps that usually lack all the browser’s niceties (View Source, Ctrl-+ to zoom, bookmarks/back/forward/history, tabs, etc.). Browser-based doesn’t mean using the cloud for all my files; browsers don’t care if they load resources from http or file:/// URLs. ChromeOS has a Content View to show you local files, supposedly integrated with the Open/Save dialog; I wish Firefox Places had a directory view along with its bookmarks and history view. I don’t want Firefox to integrate with my Linux desktop toolkit’s crappy file handling and half-hearted semantic efforts, I want Firefox to subsume them.

Desktop loyalists complain that this is a stupid idea. But what’s left that doesn’t run in a browser?

  • music player? With the HTML5 audio tag, ogg playback plus MP3 in Chrome, it’s doable
  • editor? Bespin, Firefox extensions for simple text editing, FCKedit for local WYSIWYG are good enough
  • todo list? TiddlyWiki is a complete editable wiki that runs from a single HTML file (impressive!); I use the mGSD version with action items and projects
  • photo and diagram editing? There’s Pixastic and any number of online image croppers, but the ones I’ve tried seem more like demos than tools. Svg-edit seems like it has potential for diagramming.
  • creative tools for painting, music, video? Definitely missing from the browser.

I’ve run Linux for years and besides vim and zsh, the only native app that has impressed me as much as the best browser-based apps is the Inkscape vector drawing program.

I run the Kubuntu Linux distribution on my home PC and it’s pretty rock-solid.  But sadly for its earnest volunteer developers, its particular features are irrelevant to me; it’s just the thin strip with a program start menu below my browser window. I’d probably be better off running a simpler distribution such as BrowserLinux. What I really want is for Mozilla to do the work for me.  Give me something minimalist that boots Firefox, takes advantage of all its features (it can view ZIP files! it can browse directories! it has one of the best update systems), uses the VLC plugin to play proprietary music and video formats, and integrates a folder view and downloads into Firefox’s powerful Places system. Integrate the best browser-based viewers and editors for different file types  into the browser. Alas this vision doesn’t seem high on the Mozilla organization’s list of priorities. In 2008 TechCrunch envisioned a Firefox Tablet using the right approach to software that would probably work fine on a conventional computer with a keyboard, but it seems to have stalled.

http://www.browserlinux.com/Bsssssssssssss
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audio: a Walkman down cassette land

Posted on 2010-10-25 by skierpage

Sony’s discontinuation of cassette Walkmans (in Japan at least) induces a bit of reverie.

My friend got the very first Sony Walkman straight outta Hong Kong when it first came out (it looks like this TPS-L2 at walkmancentral.com). Its innovation-that-died was the two headphone jacks, so you could listen with a friend. We tried it, quite strange. Unfortunately his weren’t labelled “guys” and “gals”.

The Walkman was an immediate hit, but it wasn’t quite revolutionary: I had a Walkman 7 years before there was a Walkman! I got (and still own) a Sony TC-44 mono dictation unit and would play music from it inside my jacket while hiking and skiing. So I invented the first Sports Walkman, cue Panasonic slogan “Just slightly ahead of our time”. There were no ear-bud headphones back then. Like all 1970s-early 80s Sony stuff, it was a high-quality tank, it worked for 20 years. I acquired all Sony’s accessories for it: leather case, pillow speaker, rechargeable battery, all high-quality. Enjoy a timeline of Sony’s glorious gadget history (which leaves out Elcaset, SQ quadraphonic, Glasstron, Sports Walkman, and many other innovations).

My very first cassette player was a Philips unit that was more geared towards dictation.  My dad got it for me along with four “musicassettes” (sic), two of which I still own; Bach Organ favorites by E. Power Biggs, and a fine performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris.

I still have my cassettes of my sister’s records and radio programs. (Yarr, piracy back when you had to push RECORD at the right split-second and adjust knobs and write song titles down.) I occasionally play them on a Denon DRM-510 deck that still plays back but can’t record. It replaced another Denon that replaced a Yamaha; unfortunately hi-fi cassette decks aren’t very durable.

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cars: every car will have an electric motor

Posted on 2010-10-11 by skierpage

I love car design and engineering, but most car fans are gas-fume-addled luddites. There’s so much angst vented at hybrid drivers, as if the worst automotive sin imaginable is buying a reliable mid-size hatchback that gets an astounding 50 mpg. If you don’t like it don’t buy one, but it’s obviously far better for society in every way for uncaring car drivers to be in a Prius rather than a giant SUV consuming 2.5 times as much gasoline.

Furthermore, the knee-jerk revulsion of all things electric overlooks the obvious giant trend in modern ICE engineering:

  • Every accessory becomes electric so that the engine can turn off at a standstill.
  • The car recovers some energy from braking to recharge its battery, energy that’s otherwise wasted as hot brake pads.
  • The car has an efficient motor to propel it with electricity from the battery.

Then you simply adjust the size of the battery and the power of the starter/motor/generator to make different versions:

  1. micro-hybrid whose motor can only restart the engine and assist in pulling away from a standstill
  2. hybrid whose motor alone can propel the car for some distance up to some speed
  3. plug-in hybrid, recharging at home as the cheapest and least-polluting way to go the first whatever miles gas-free

How well the hybrid works depends on whether the car maker has seen the light and licensed Toyota’s HSD, the ingenious e-CVT that replaces the transmission and clutch to allow optimum blending of engine RPM, engine power, motor power and electricity regeneration; Ford and Mazda and Subaru have all done so (though Ford has a fig-leaf arrangement to hide their purchase of transmissions from Toyota and its supplier Aisin). How far the plug-in hybrid goes gas-free depends on whether the car maker has lined up a supply of enormous expensive battery packs. But even the lamest micro-hybrids like the big Mercedes-Benz models increase the production volume and reduce the cost of the common electric components for all three levels.

Meanwhile USA car models fall further behind. Apparently the obvious no-brainer of a car that doesn’t pollute or consume gas at a standstill does not improve EPA mpg figures, so car makers stupidly don’t include this feature on their USA-bound cars. In Europe, Audi, BMW, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, and VW all sell cars with at least “stop-start technology” (i.e. micro-hybrids), but those models don’t make it to the USA. It saves the manufacturers $$$ now but it keeps them from embracing the future.

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