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.

Posted in audio, electronics | Leave a comment

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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cars: GreenDriveExpo

Posted on 2010-10-10 by skierpage

After I ate my vegan granola, I pedaled over to the Green Drive Expo to celebrate alternative fuel vehicles (“Stupid smug eco hippies!” – Cartman)

I missed Toyota’s talk, I would have loved to say “What the hell have you been doing for a DECADE since the 2002 RAV4 EV cars parked to your left!” (several owners drove theirs over).

Chelsea Sexton’s talk was great, very reasoned yet enthusiastic.

  • We have to move on from beating up GM over the EV-1 fiasco.
  • “I don’t have a problem with someone buying a Volt.  I’m concerned about as many EV miles as possible.”
  • Her favorite study is from EPRI, finds that the worse-case EV is about as clean as  Prius.
  • The all EV range means it isn’t for everyone, but for those who need more maybe they get rental credits.
  • Tesla played a crucial role in showing what’s possible
  • Utilities might pre-order lots of kW·h from car makers in the form of used batteries [a battery down to 70% of capacity is still very useful as a stationery energy storage] to reduce up-front cost.

Toyota had three plug-in Prius prototypes, it looks identical to the regular Prius. Even though it only goes 14 miles all-electric, after it switches to hybrid operation the plug-in Prius gets better mpg than the Prius, so it’ll sell fine.

The 2002 RAV4 EV gets much better range, and it’s so strange and infuriating to see the future from the past! The owners have to be creative, they unscrew their obsolete inductive paddle charging boxes from the wall and bring them with them and plug them into 240V.

I talked to two Tesla Roadster owners.  It’s well-finished for a low-volume sports car. The way the LEDs light around the charging receptacle is cool.

The only news to me was Ford is going to put its new plug-in hybrid drivetrain that’s going into the Fusion in the new Escape, and it will be available in all-wheel drive. On the other hand, the Ford representatives who said this also maintained Ford doesn’t currently sell an AWD Escape Hybrid! I drove the mule, the ugly bloated current Escape. The car pulled away in EV mode, but even at low speeds the gas engine was running. The Ford representative had stupidly left the air conditioning on, and it is engine-powered, forcing the engine to run! The moment I turned it off, the engine shut down.

There was one display-only Nissan Leaf.  It’s a strikingly weird-looking car, like a hatchback that expanded and melted in the microwave. The interior is fantastic.

All the other electric-only cars compete in the Leaf’s shadow. The Mitsubish MiEV and Think EV (which was also around in 2002) don’t look like the future. Smart was there, but sadly with the current gasoline model (a tiny car that gets much worse mpg than a Prius, for when size is more important than economy), supposedly the electric Smart should show up soon.

Brammo showed their slick Enertia electric motorcycle, and Pacific EBike showed a lot of $900 Chinese-made electric bicycles and mopeds. Electric bikes are an interesting alternative, enthusiasts pay way more than that to “add lightness” so they can pedal further, but these heavy bikes do the work for you. The smaller the vehicle, the lighter and cheaper the battery, so it’s primarily the USA’s car-centric culture that prevents these alternatives to putting your 200 lb ass in a 3,000 lb vehicle to go to work and shops from selling like crazy.

I’ll upload pix soon.

Posted in cars, eco | 1 Comment

open source: YOU are the marketing department

Posted on 2010-10-07 by skierpage

There are hundreds of thousands of open source projects, each addressing a problem and hoping to make the world a better place, and most struggle to gain traction.  It’s disheartening that so many open source contributors fail so badly at the most basic way to promote their project: They don’t say what their project does! I read the planets (aggregators of blog posts) for all the software I run, and every day I come across dozens of blog posts like

“WeboKLavMer 0.6.312 is out! Several fixes and a new DjangoHadoop back-end for SaaS goodness thanks to @Joey. Download it here, patches welcome.”

Great, everyone reading knows you’re an active software developer and Joey helped on… something. This non-communication is an epic open-source industry-wide fail that aggressively and almost contemptuously throws away millions of opportunities to get your message out for no good reason. Instead every time the message is “you’re not cool enough to already know what my pet project is.”

  1. You are the marketing department for your project.
  2. You never know who will come across one of your communications, and you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

So: The second sentence of every announcement and blog post HAS to be a summary of what the hell your project does. It’s a good exercise to come up with a crisp meaningful one-sentence overview and no one will begrudge you the repetition.

Posted in open source, web | Leave a comment

web: computer NELL learns by reading

Posted on 2010-10-06 by skierpage

The Read the Web team at CMU have come up with NELL, a computer program that learns by reading web pages, extracting facts and improving its reading ability as it does so.

As I blogged a few years ago, we’ve been here before, starting with the Cyc project.  After 26 years, that’s struggled to get to 170,000 facts. The NELL team are proud to have reached 440,000 beliefs, but I suspect the whole project will get sludgy and confused as it tries to turn the richness of language into a set of cut-and-dried belief statements. As I commented elsewhere, the more meanings that you patiently explain to these systems, the less they know. Very quickly they learn “New York” is a “city” which is a geographical and governmental entity, but what the hell do they do with the sentence “I’m in a New York state of mind”?! The context for meaning is vast, it takes years of hard living in the real world to gain meaning from many sentences about the world. (Thus the AI researchers trying to raise a robot like a baby.)

Also, many of the things that NELL has figured out are already well-explained and codified in information sources on the web, such as the mighty Wikipedia. The New York Times article about the project gives the example

Peyton Manning is a football player (category). The Indianapolis Colts is a football team (category). By scanning text patterns, NELL can infer with a high probability that Peyton Manning plays for the Indianapolis Colts.

But just go to Wikipedia and in the source of Peyton Manning’s page you see [[Category:American football quarterbacks]] and in the template, {Infobox NFLactive ... |currentteam=Indianapolis Colts}} ! Almost every fact simple enough for NELL to learn that’s notable is already codified on Wikipedia! Already the DBpedia project takes such semi-structured data from Wikipedia pages and maps it to computer-readable semantic statements using standard vocabularies like rdf:Description, skos:subject, dbprop:currentteam , etc. DBpedia has millions of such bits of information about the millions of things that have Wikipedia pages. Does it know more then NELL’s 440,000 facts? Well, what does it mean to “know” something anyway? What does it mean to mean something? What is what? Huh?

It’s cool that NELL has amassed so many beliefs by reading, but that’s dwarfed by the millions of machine-readable “facts” already out there. NELL knows enough to get confused and require human correction, but that’s a weak kind of intelligence. If a NELL or DBpedia can’t do original research or come up with insights, then is either system better than Googling “What is Peyton Manning’s football team?” and scanning the results for an answer?

When Doug Lenat started Cyc in 1984 it was all about reading a “newspaper”, a quaint set of articles printed on a dead tree. Now it’s all social and webified. You can read NELL’s tweet stream and see it get things right, and wrong:

I think “Steel Mobile Phone” is a #buildingmaterial (http://bit.ly/b4V0HU)
I think “dutchtown high school” is a #sportsteam (http://bit.ly/bCh4YY)
I think “doubletree hotel and waltham” is a #hotel (http://bit.ly/aanr6j

Scanning NELL’s apparent representation:

  • The team’s scrunchedtogethernames willfully ignores the Wikipedia friendly naming approch, e.g. Building_material.
  • I wonder how NELL will handle naming conflicts.  Again, Wikipedia has a fine approach: Steel (band), Steel (comics), Steel (film), etc. NELL needs to learn to disambiguate its names by matching Wikipedia articles, otherwise it’s going to wind up terribly confused between all the Michael Jacksons out there.
Posted in search, semantic web | Leave a comment

Mannerism and the end of post-modernism

Posted on 2010-09-22 by skierpage

Maybe this aperçu from Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker explains why the noughties of this new millennium have been underwhelming. I want to live in the modern age, even if I have to go retro to do so!

… As the Mannerists toiled in the twilight of the Renaissance, so do we in relation to the modern age—the word “modern” having been torn from its roots to signify things that loom behind us.

Mannerist pose: a Bronzino nude, circa 1545-60.

He goes on to link mashup/remix culture and other cultural efforts to Mannerism:

The movie “Avatar” strikes me as Mannerist through and through, generating terrific sensations of originality from a hodgepodge of worn-thin narrative and pictorial tropes. Ours is a dissolving, clever culture of mix and match. We are ready for Bronzino.

But <whiny voice> “I don’t like Mannerism”.  The accelerating pace of technological change is a given in our society, even if art has trouble keeping up.  Maybe that’s why architecture manages (sometimes) to stay fresh—there are new technologies and techniques of making modern buildings in post-post-modern times even if some architects “only” use them to drape expressive forms.

he movie “Avatar” strikes me as Mannerist through and through, generating terrific sensations of originality from a hodgepodge of worn-thin narrative and pictorial tropes. Ours is a dissolving, clever culture of mix and match. We are ready for Bronzino.
Posted in architecture, art | Leave a comment

Blogger import and maintaining old blog URLs

Posted on 2010-09-18 by skierpage

I exported my site from the Blogger console, which produced a big XML file of my site in Atom feed format.  Now what? I can import by

  • Adding the Blogger import plug-in to WordPress, which seems to ignore the export and may assume it can access my blog on blogspot.com.
  • Using the WordPress RSS importer plug-in to import the XML file
  • Using the Blogger2WordPress online tool to convert the XML file into WordPress .WXR format, then import that.

So much to decide, and most guides on the web are all from 2006 and 2008.

While I puzzle this out I want to keep my old blog URLS working. WordPress let me have Permalinks (using Apache mod_rewrite rules) for my blog entries that have almost the same structure as Blogger posts, except the link appears as a directory ending in /, not a .html file.  Since every URL that Blogger produced (not just to posts, but archives, and labels) ends in .html, it seems there’s no conflict between a WordPress “Permalink” like /blog/2010/09/blogger-import-or-maintaining-old-blog-urls/ and a Blogger static file like /blog/2006/04/skiing-salomons-missteps-since-xscream.html.  So all I had to do is add the WordPress script to my blog directory and the new URLs intersperse with the old… It seems to work!, and it’s simpler than writing my own mod_rewrite rules to point to a /blog-old directory.

Posted in web | Tagged | 1 Comment

Shifting to WordPress

Posted on 2010-09-18 by skierpage

Blogger stopped supporting FTP, so I haven’t been able to update my blog, nor have people’s comments on pages shown up.

I finally got Monkeybrains to install WordPerfect (their page says “Email monkeybrains, and we’ll set up a WordPress blog for you — it takes us less than 30 seconds (once we get to your email).”

Now trying to figure out how to keep my old blog working with Apache mod_rewrite rules, and/or how to import the XML backup.

Posted in web | Tagged | Leave a comment