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February 28, 2005
Austin Till Thursday
I'm in Austin from Monday afternoon until Thursday afternoon. Our CTO visits on Tuesday, so I'll be his transport until he flies back to Dallas at 8pm. I am looking forward to Cynthia's NNth birthday on Wed., too! (I have no idea what the number is ... and I don't wanna know!)
Posted by Steven at 03:26 PM | Comments (0)
Jef Raskin, Father of the Mac, Is Dead
 | Just saw in Infoworld that Jef Raskin, the man who initiated what became the Macintosh computer, has died of pancreatic cancer at 61. |
Jef Raskin, the lead designer of the first Macintosh computer and a pioneer in the development of user interfaces, died Saturday at age 61. He had been diagnosed recently with pancreatic cancer, his family said in a statement.Raskin joined Apple Computer in 1978 as employee number 31 and headed the company's Macintosh development team from its inception until 1982. He named the project after his favorite type of apple, changing the spelling for copyright reasons.
He is credited with significantly advancing the design of user interfaces, which in the early 1980s were largely text-based and required users to memorize complex commands. Raskin convinced his peers at Apple that to reach a wider audience, the Macintosh needed an interface that was elegant and easy to use.
"Up to that time, at Apple and most other manufacturers, the concept was to provide the latest and most powerful hardware, and let the users and third-party software vendors figure out how to make it usable," he wrote later on his Web site.
Raskin left Apple in 1982, two years before the Macintosh went on sale, but he continued to influence the design of computers through his writing, lectures and consulting work. Soon after leaving the company he founded Information Appliance Inc., where he designed the Canon Cat computer for Canon USA, although the product was not a commercial success.
Posted by Steven at 02:39 PM | Comments (0)
February 27, 2005
Skype
The International Hearld Tribute has an article about Skype, a Voice over IP (VOIP) application that implements a telephone on your computer.
Naturally, there's a catch. You must have a computer with a headset, or at least a microphone and speakers, and a relatively recent operating system - Windows XP or 2000 for Skype on a PC, OS X version 10.3 for a Mac. And for your call to be truly free, your counterparty must also have Skype.To talk to another person who has Skype, you enter the user name, press return and you're in business. The quality is usually better than the average cellphone call. It took five minutes for a friend in the United States to download the software from www.skype.com and call me.
Of course, card-based services that route ordinary phone calls through the Internet have been reducing the cost of long-distance calls for some time, and probably millions of people are already talking free over the Internet with voice chat software from Apple, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo.
Skype goes a critical step farther. With a pay service called Skype Out, you have the option of using the power of the Internet to dial into local phone networks around the world. To call the United States and many other countries from France, the per-minute cost is 1.7 euro cents, or 2.2 U.S. cents. (Calls to cellphones are pricier: It costs me 1.92 euro cents to call a fixed line in Japan, for example, but 12.5 cents a minute to call a mobile there). These prices are cheap enough that I will do my best never to make a regular long-distance call again.
Skype, based in Luxembourg, was started by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the co-founders of Kazaa, the peer-to-peer, or P2P, file-sharing software that has gone straight after a previous life as an outlaw music-sharing program. Skype, which as of Friday registered more than 76 million downloads of its software, employs the same P2P approach as Kazaa.
Other VOIP companies have taken different approaches. Vonage, based in New Jersey, offers a service that completely replaces your traditional phone line. Its service, which starts at $14.99 a month in the United States, allows you to plug an ordinary phone into your broadband connection. International rates, still very cheap, are about twice what you would pay on Skype. Vonage is not yet available outside of North America and Britain.
People who use Internet calling will tell you that something happens to people when costs fall to zero. Cost-conscious parents in the old country begin calling every day. Friends who see each other once or twice a year put on the headsets and chat for hours at a stretch, as though they were in the same town. The cost of telecommuting plummets.
Just how the VOIP revolution will play out remains to be seen. Big telecoms will surely not submit without a fight. And while national regulators have taken a hands-off approach so far, a more aggressive stance could curtail the growth of Internet telephony or increase the cost to users.
The company I work for (Maskina) is in the debit-card long-distance business. Fortunately, our market is largely folks who don't have the kind of money needed to have a decent computer and broadband (at both ends of the call) so for now, the "bottom dropping out" sensation that large carriers are experieincing over Skype hasn't hit Maskina ... yet.
Posted by Steven at 03:00 PM | Comments (0)
February 24, 2005
Alanna at the Solo and Ensemble Festival
Alanna participated in an event called Solo and Ensemble Festival. The event is not a competition. Instead, the musicians perform before a judge who then grades the performance (the scores are "exemplary", 1, 2, or 3). In both her solo and the trio she performed with friends, she received a score of 1. She also received a blue medal for performing 9th grade, class 1 music. Class 1 is the hardest level, and she is still in the eight grade.
Posted by Steven at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)
Porco Rosso
Alanna and I watched Porco Rosso tonite for the first time in English. I was quite taken with Susan Egan's voice acting, and was surprised to see that David Ogden Stiers did the voice of the granpa Piccolo. The story was fully fleshed now that I didn't have to read the lousy subtitles (we have the Chinese bootleg), and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
We're scheming to get Anne to play Gina, and Leo the boy Marco "Porco" Rosso at A-Kon this summer.
Posted by Steven at 11:47 PM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2005
Dark Galaxy Lights Up Black
 | Astronomers have discovered what may be the first dark matter galaxy. A tenth of a percent of it's mass cloud of hydrogen is spinning around an unseen center that has no visible stars yet holds the local objects in place. If it was a black hole, there would be plasma jets at the poles, but instead, there's ... nothing. This galaxy "lights up black to indicate something", as Doug Adams would have put it. See the cat? See the cradle? |
Astronomers say they have discovered an object that appears to be an invisible galaxy made almost entirely of dark matter.The team, led by Cardiff University, claimed it is the first to be detected.
A dark galaxy is an area in the Universe containing a large amount of mass that rotates like a galaxy, but contains no stars.
It was found 50 million light years away using radio telescopes in Cheshire and Puerto Rico.
The unknown material that is thought to hold these dark galaxies together is known as 'dark matter', but scientists still know very little about what that is.
The five-year research has involved studying the distribution of hydrogen atoms throughout the Universe, estimated by looking at the rotation of galaxies and the speed at which their components moved.
Hydrogen gas releases radiation that can be detected at radio wavelengths.
In the Virgo cluster of galaxies, they found a mass of hydrogen atoms a hundred million times the mass of the Sun.
The mysterious galaxy has been called VIRGOHI21.
Similar objects that have previously been discovered have since turned out to contain stars or be remnants of two galaxies colliding.
However, the scientists from the UK, France, Italy and Australia found no visible trace of any stars, and no galaxies nearby that would suggest a collision.
Dr Robert Minchin, of Cardiff University, said: "From its speed, we realised that VIRGOHI21 was a thousand times more massive than could be accounted for by the observed hydrogen atoms alone.
"If it were an ordinary galaxy, then it should be quite bright and would be visible with a good amateur telescope."
Posted by Steven at 11:18 AM | Comments (2)
February 22, 2005
Inside the Feline Brain
Courtesy Tom White:
Ruby also has a huge region titled "Psychotic fear of the sound of crumpled plastic sheeting". In fact, it's essentially throughout her brain.
Posted by Steven at 03:23 PM | Comments (0)
It's Here, But I'm Not!
Anne tells me that her Mac Mini arrived yesterday, which means Apple delivered it a week early. A premie, as it were.
Now the work begins ... moving Anne's XP world to Mac OS X. Mail and web posting will be straightforward ... but the stubborn PC apps won't.
Posted by Steven at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)
February 21, 2005
More Water on Mars
Scientists (hey, you didn't expect intelligent designers, did you?) have discovered evidence of pack ice near the Martian equator.
A frozen sea, surviving as blocks of pack ice, may lie just beneath the surface of Mars, suggest observations from Europe's Mars Express spacecraft. The sea is just 5° north of the Martian equator and would be the first discovery of a large body of water beyond the planet's polar ice caps.Images from the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express show raft-like ground structures - dubbed "plates" - that look similar to ice formations near Earth's poles, according to an international team of scientists.
But the site of the plates, near the equator, means that sunlight should have melted any ice there. So the team suggests that a layer of volcanic ash, perhaps a few centimetres thick, may protect the structures.
"I think it's fairly plausible," says Michael Carr, an expert on Martian water at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, who was not part of the team. He says scientists had previously suspected there was a past water source north of the Elysium plates. "We know where the water came from," Carr told New Scientist. "You can trace the valleys carved by water down to this area."
The Mars Society, not unsurpisingly, is orgasmic about this discovery.
The Mars Express team's discovery, if confirmed, is of extraordinary importance. Up until now, the only pure water resources known to exist on Mars have been found in its polar regions. Water is known to exist in signicant percentages the soil and in hydrates all over Mars, but processing these involves solid handling procedures of significantly greater complexity and power requirements greater than those needed to deal with ice. The availability of pure ice easily accessible from the surface would be of enormous benefit to future Martian explorers and settlers, as combined with the known plentiful carbon dioxide resources of the Martian atmophere, would allow synthesis of hydrocarbon fuels and oxidizers, the production of food, fiber, fabrics, plastics,and innumerable other necessary items. Water is also needed for many other essential industrial processes involving the production of metals and other chemicals.This is a vastly more favorable resource prospect that exists on the
impoverished Moon, where water is only present in parts per million
quantities in deeply frozen permantly shadowed craters near the Lunar
poles, and carbon is absent entirely.In addition, frozen bodies of water in the Martian tropics may hold
enormous scientific value, as they could contain preserved, or even
dormant but viable, microbial Martian life forms. The detection and
analyis of such life could provide the Rosetta Stone for human
undertanding of the nature, prevalence, and potential diversity of
life in the cosmos.
In other words, where there's water, there's the hope of colonization. On the Moon, you will always be drinking imported water.
Posted by Steven at 01:03 PM | Comments (1)
February 20, 2005
Working the Week
Supposedly, I'll be coming down on Mon. and going home on Thurs. through March. Of course, my mileage has, and will, vary. Expect me this week, however, for certain.
Posted by Steven at 04:27 PM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2005
New Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trailer on Amazon
See it here.
Posted by Steven at 12:15 AM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2005
Ruby at Home
Here's a picture of Ruby from this morning, just before the body wrap was removed by the vet.
She's doing well at home now.
Posted by Steven at 11:25 PM | Comments (1)
JMS Proposing To Save Star Trek
Joe Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, has written a series "bible" and is challenging the fan base to deluge Paramount with fan mail to back the idea.
Last year, Bryce and I sat down and, on our own, out of a sheer love of Trek as it was and should be, wrote a series bible/treatment for a return to the roots of Trek. To re-boot the Trek universe. Understand: writer/producers in TV just don't do that sort of thing on their own, everybody always insists on doing it for vast sums of money. We did it entirely on our own, setting aside other, paying deadlines out of our passion for the series. We set out a full five-year arc.
If anyone can save Trek, it's Joe.
Posted by Steven at 10:41 PM | Comments (1)
February 15, 2005
Ruby Update
Good news. Ruby's out of the OR, and she regained consciousness. That was the first big test, as a cat of her low weight and advanced age can sometimes have a heart murmur that causes them to die as soon as they are put under for the operation.
There's a chance Anne will have her home tonite. I'm getting more optimistic about this as time goes by.
Posted by Steven at 02:23 PM | Comments (0)
February 14, 2005
Speaking of the Wave Function
I have no idea when I'll be back in Austin.
Either I am coming back Wed. through Thurs., or I'll be down Mon. through Thurs. Either way, I am going to be travelling a lot. I anticipate coming down this Wed. (16th) but who really knows?
Posted by Steven at 05:22 PM | Comments (0)
Now I Know How Schrödinger Felt
Tomorrow, Ruby goes to the vet for a major surgery. The outcome is far from certain, and lies (in some sense) in the "future", which is a quantum physicists' way of saying "after a wave function collapses". The most famous quantum physicist was Schrödinger, who proposed an experiment in quantum physics with the life of his cat resting on the balance of the outcome. He was trying to show that we cannot predict the future, and was making a grandious statement by way of his pet.
We aren't so lucky. Anne and I have made a choice, and we hope it's the right one. The wave function collapses tomorrow. We hope and hope some more that it collapses in our (and Ruby's) favor.
If anyone has a Heisenberg Compensator out there ... let us know.
Posted by Steven at 05:20 PM | Comments (1)
February 12, 2005
iMac Back
I went to the Apple Store (Willow Bend) last night after work, and goaded the tech there to fix my system while I waited. He replaced the main logic board, which is a pretty serious blow out. I guess whatever refurbishing was done on the system didn't stick.
I put in a Kingston 512 Mb DDR when I got home, and it booted fine. I loaded my .Mac info (deltosfleet) and registered the Apple Care for the system, so I'm back up.
Posted by Steven at 01:12 PM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2005
New Photo Album Online
I signed up for a .Mac account (deltosfleet@mac.com) and one of the first things I did was fiddle with the online web site. Here is my first photo album. I'll change it as new images catch my eye.
Posted by Steven at 01:04 PM | Comments (0)
Tom and Val's Newborn Son
My friend from RPI, Tom White, is a dad for the second time. He and his wife Valerie Wenner had their second child, a son named Carson, this morning around 11am after eight hours of labor (and only one hour in the actual delivery room). Carson came in around 6 lbs. 6 oz., if I heard Tom correctly, and arrived fifteen days early.
Our best wishes to Tom and Val and Amalie (big sis).
Posted by Steven at 11:39 AM | Comments (1)
Battlestar Galactica Renewed
The SciFi Channel has ordered a second season of Battlestar Galactica.
I expected the rehashing of this series to be just plain awful, but Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica is a brilliant retelling of the tale. Set forty years after the events in the original version, but with the twist that the Humans beat the Cylons instead of succumbing to them, it picks up the original theme of the last humans fleeing a wave of cybernetic death.
However, the nausiatingly Republican themes of "trust, but verify" (peaceniks are always losers) and the obvious mapping of Soviets as Cylons, along with the goofy pseudo-Christian and Erik Von Däniken plot lines made the seventies version un-watchable. Moore turns that on its head: the Cylons are the religious fundamentalists. The computer is enemy in this new series. The main characters are played very differently, with some obvious shakeups like a female Starbuck. Don't miss James Olmos as Commander Adama ... he's almost perfect for the role. The computer generated effects are light-years ahead of Dykstra's post-Star Wars work, and they look jaw-droppingly good.
Moore has done the impossible. He took a joke that colloquially was called Cattlecar Galactica and revived it, updated it, and even twisted it around the original series, to make a fantastically better version.
Posted by Steven at 12:17 AM | Comments (2)
February 10, 2005
Ruby Update
Anne has scheduled surgery for Ruby next Tuesday. We're going to have the "radical chain" done ... where the vet removes the malignant tissue and all the other tissues associated with the (in Ruby's case) right side. The cost is a little more than just a lumpectomy, but will (if she survives the operation and recovers) buy her more time.
We're on pins-and-needles as Ruby has been ulcerating more and more. Anne has some special cat food intended to boost her body weight (around 5 lbs.) before surgery, to help with the anesthesia and recovery.
Posted by Steven at 11:57 PM | Comments (1)
February 09, 2005
Now That Was a Weird Dream
I'm having a tough night asleep. I ate some pasta for dinner, and I don't have Pepsid to help me make it through the night. In my refluxy boughts of sleep, I dreamt that C-NET or some equivalent TV show that highlights some poor Geek's life, including all the embarrassing things about it, profiled me.
The next thing I knew, people were showing up bearing gifts to "compensate" for my life's misgivings. First a bunch of clever, small scale kinetic sculptures arrived. I guess my love of Rickey's stuff came lumbering up from the id, knocking all the other stuff out of the way. Then people showed up with the stuff needed to make a geek-themed store, I guess it was a gaming store with CosPlay stuff as well. All I can remember, as the dream fades from my mind, was a lot of shiny cloth material. In the midst of this were a horde of folks I knew as well as those I didn't know. I don't even know where the dream was happening ... just that TV exposure brought a torrent of good and bad all at once; but before it did, it had to first humiliate me.
That sounds like Reality TV to me. God I hope the iSight wasn't on tonite!
Posted by Steven at 04:14 AM | Comments (2)
February 08, 2005
Comedy Central's Distraction
I've been catching the odd episode of Comedy Central's Distraction and I gotta say, it's pretty damned funny. This is one of the purer UK imports (outside of BBC America) in that they have the real British MC, and they do damned outrageous things to the contestants. Sure, sometimes it's humiliating but the premise is clever, and the quizzes are often cleverly dastardly.
Posted by Steven at 10:03 PM | Comments (0)
Richelle's Early Birthday Present
I stopped by the Peake's last night and gave Richelle (my sister Leigh Anne's oldest child) a digital camera for her birthday. It's an older model Vivicam, which I was the first to admit wasn't particularly sophisticated, but it will take decent photos.
Example 1. A rare photo of Richelle.
I didn't know this, but Richelle is taking a digital photography class, so this will give her a tool that she can use outside of school. I hope she uses it to take photos of her experiences in Austin and shares them with her parents back in San Diego.
Posted by Steven at 09:15 AM | Comments (1)
Our Cat Has Cancer
We had a terrible discovery this weekend. Ruby, our fifteen year-old Persian cat, has breast cancer. She has developed a large cyst on her abdomen, which ulcerated. When that bleed, we discovered the problem.
On Sunday I called Karen Purcell for some advice. Everything she told me has turned out to be right on target. We got Ruby to a local vet on Monday, and she did the initial diagnosis (breast cancer), a chest X-ray (no cancer in the lungs -- very good sign), and then the blood work (correction: not so good news, she's malignant but the damage hasn't spread to other organs) in the evening.
So, we're going to have the vet remove the tumor, and Anne is thinking we should go the full nine-yards and do a radical mastecomy (yes, they can do that on a cat). The problem is that, at her advanced age, the surgery could harm Ruby more than the cancer. In any case, she's not going to be with us for more than a year or so.
We're both pretty upset by this. I bought Ruby from a wacky Plano breeder (Karen said that she thought that being weird was a requirement for breeders) right after we moved into our first and only home, as a reminder of her previous Persian pet when she lived in Potsdam. Ruby originally was very attached to me, but over the years, she shifted her attentions to the real momma cat in the house (Anne). She always resented it when we brought in Bix, her half-brother, and later, C-fer, the cat-pie. Over the years, she's been a constant part of our family and a beloved pet ... we will miss her greatly, but even worse, we hate the thought that we will have to choose the day she dies.
Posted by Steven at 09:08 AM | Comments (3)
February 05, 2005
Austin All Week
I'm driving down to Austin on Monday, returning to Dallas on Thursday night.
Posted by Steven at 03:57 PM | Comments (0)
My First Hint Was The Word "Refurbished"
The iMac G5 completely crapped out last night. It was acting like there was a logic problem in the display system, and then the screen went completely dark. If I had enabled Apple Remote Desktop, I might have been able to log in and look around, but the screen/LCD subsystem was gone.
This morning I dashed to the Willow Bend Apple Store, already signed into the "Genius Bar". I had to wait a bit, but at least the tech/genius didn't argue with me about the problem: he, too, could see nothing on the screen.
I told him I wanted to buy the extended warranty (ironically, Apple will sell you this the same day you bring in a broken item), partially because I knew I had to before 3-2-05, and partially to soften him up. As it turned out, all he could do was order the parts and suggest that the unit might be repaired by Friday (I'm in Austin all next week), so Alanna and Leo will not be on iChat AV until then. I could have had the parts sent to the house, but I figured if the unit is in the Apple Store they will fix it more quickly if something else craps out.
When I ordered the unit, I couldn't figure out why Apple was offering refurbished verisons of a brand new product. Now perhaps I do ... the logic board was flaky and probably didn't pass all the tests or something screwy like that. The net lesson is (no, not that Apple is crap) to avoid "refurbished" items.
I hope.
Posted by Steven at 03:57 PM | Comments (0)
February 01, 2005
VW, Tough Little Cars!
Ok, this is COMPLETELY in BAD TASTE but I love it. Oh, and the folks who made this "viral" ad are being sued by VW, for what its worth.
Click on this link if it doesn't load.
Posted by Steven at 03:18 PM | Comments (3)
Could This Be My Kid, Too?
Hey, Alanna's pretty hard core. For that matter, Leo's clinically obsessed with gaming. Even Anne's pretty obsessed with her word puzzle games. I'm starting to look like the lamer here ... oh, what have I wrought?
Posted by Steven at 02:21 PM | Comments (3)
Another Reason to Quit Using XP
Soon Microsoft will stop allowing Windows updates for XP users who do not have an authentication key assigned to their machine. This will explode the number of dying Windows XP systems choking in their own malware juices. One obvious side effect is that the number of zombie systems will expand greatly. Another is that Microsoft will drive (hopefully) millions of customers who are fed up with being treated like criminals over to the Macintosh.
It's funny to read how Microsoft is apparently going ahead with plans to let hackers help the company battle pirates. What else can you call a program that denies security fixes to users whose systems haven't been certified "genuine" by Microsoft? The idea, I think, is for these machines to sit around unprotected until they eventually become useless under the weight of malware.That would presumably happen sometime before the machine would need rebuilding anyway, as Windows machines just eventually seem to quit, victims of the vile system registry. The death march is faster if you frequently install and remove applications, but it seems to happen to every machine eventually. This is the computing equivalent of how some doctors say that everyone will eventually get Alzheimer's—if something else doesn't get them first.
Still, before the unprotected machines became useless, they would likely become public nuisances, spewing out spam and malware in search of other unprotected machines or stupid users. That is if the pirates don't find some way around this "Genuine Microsoft Software" verification program that apparently is fast going down the road from voluntary to mandatory.
Switch now, before the rush.
Posted by Steven at 10:50 AM | Comments (0)