William Adams' WebLog : Editorial

Internet Incents Inactivity In Industry

wadams — Mon, 24 May 2004 05:36:00 GMT

Right now I'm listening to the local radio station http://www.kuow.org online. I could just as easily be listening to some Brazilian music from half way down the other end of the planet. I only have a lowly DSL connect at 384K download. I could have a high speed cable internet connection at 3Mb, but hay, the current speed is just fine for listening to voice, and even music, over the internet.

Why would I ever buy another radio receiver in my life? The last one I bought, a nice Denon amplifier with the radio receiver built in, seems quaint. I probably never listened to the radio receiver part anyway. Now, I'll never even bother to fire up that side of the 'receiver'. So, Denon, you might as well stop including that part of the receiver, and lower the price. As a matter of fact, you might as well cut receivers out of the loop completely because I can get it from the internet now.

I'm on the verge of getting my videos that way as well. Comcast digital cable/internet, offers video on demand. I can watch whatever I want, whenever I want, almost. No more wasting time with DVDs, NetFlix, BlockBuster, nothing. I'll just get it all over the internet.

Oh, and QWest communications? I'll be getting my phone calls through VOIP with my Comcast connection as well. So, you might as well just take down those phone lines and get rid of all those employees manning those empty buildings, because I won't be needing you anymore.

And, Fry's Electronics, as much as you've been a part of my geek upbringing, I'm now getting my stuff through J&R Electronics, because they offer two day delivery, with no taxes, and they have everything in stock, at lower prices. So, roll on back with your unknowledgeable sales people, take away your mega stores, and turn those parking lots into nice parks will yah?

The internet is an industry killer! Whole towns will begin to shut down as the internaut's all consuming economic wrecking tentacles squeeze every last ounce of efficiency out of those little fiber optic wires running all over the planet.

It has been sneaking up on us slowly, but I see it for what it is now. The internet causes inactivity in otherwise thriving sectors of our world economy. Well, of course there's Vonage, and they're making money, and they're a new business, and there's the coffers of UPS and FedEx which will be ever expanding. And who knows how many J&R Electronics distributers will sprout up to claim the mantle of best internet electronics retailer. And don't even get me started about what's going to happen to the music recording industry.

Yes, the internet killed the radio star, but in it's place, there is emerging a new constellation of opportunities and possibilities.

Build or Buy?

wadams — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 08:51:00 GMT

That is the question.

Be it nobler to pull up your sleeves than to bow to the will of the component provider?

So, here's the deal. This past weekend, Yasmin and I finished the path around the back yard. It took 20 bags of bark hauled from the hardware store to the back yard. Pouring the bags out, and raking them smooth was a much more enjoyable task than hauling the border bricks, or digging up the grass.

All told, this project cost... I don't know, at least 16 hours of hard manual labor. About $300 in various materials, and quite a few gallons of sweat and peanut butter sandwhiches. If I put my time at about $50/hour, that's another $800. So, a path around the perimeter of my back yard, $1,100. Path around back yard, $1,100, time with Yasmin... Priceless.

I could have hired a landscape person to come do the same thing, and it probably would have cost about $400 or so, but hay, it's my design.

Then, the 18th was the nanny's birthday. Recently Yasmin and I have been taking picutures with the digital camera. This past weekend we went out to Mt Vernon and took a bunch of pictures of tulips. Yasmin's actually pretty good at taking pictures. She's probably better than me, and I attribute it to the fact that she's shorter, so she captures more unique perspectives.

At any rate, we thought we'd use the pictures to make a calendar for the nanny's birthday present.

Build vs buy... Let's see, I can go to Barnes and Noble right now and buy a calendar on sale for about $4. OK. So, that's a starting point.

First, we had to buy a printer that could print nice high quality photos. I have a Canon S50 camera, so I thought I would get a nice Canon printer. Of course I had to have the one that I could plug the CF card into directly. the i900D, cost $250. Then of course the extra paper, ink, and extended warranty... That's another $100 or so, for a grand total of $350.

Alright, now I can print nice pictures, in sizes from 4x6 to 8.5x11.

I need to be able to print monthly calendars. Luckily, I have Calendar Creator, so I didn't have to write that piece of software, although I could have if need be. Now there's assembly.

This is no ordinary calendar. With the high quality pictures that Yasmin took, and the good calendar job, we can just staple the job together like some grade school project. Nope, this will require one of those nice binding jobs like you get with presentations at work. OK, off to OfficeMax/Depot/Staple/Supply center. I just need one of those binders thingies that punches a bunch of holes and helps you put on that plastic spiral thingy. Of course the $50 one is no longer available, so I have to bump up to the $135 model! Just put punch uniform holes and put in that platic binder thing. I am now the proud owner of the GBC Combind C100.

Quick total: Printer and accessories $350, Binder, $135, 12 images at $.50/ea = $6. Time, well, it was around midnight when I finished, and I started at around 7:00, so 5 hours == $250. Grand total... $741

It bit pricey for a calendar, but hay, it's my design darn it!

I know there's a lesson to be learned here about software development, but I'm in sticker shock, and too worried about what else I can print and bind to recoup my recent purchases.

The one good benefit of staying up late night working on high end crafts is that I get to watch the likes of Monster house, Monster garage, and American Chopper.

But, that's another story.

Trouncing Trash Takes Time and Tenacity

wadams — Sun, 04 Apr 2004 05:39:00 GMT

During the winter in my neighborhood, the begetation looks pretty baren. Things become really simple. Everything but the evergreens, loses it's leaves, dries up, and kinda disappears. You can see everything clearly without all the clutter in the way. Without the leaves, it is relatively easy to see the broken and dying branches. You go in with your pruning shears, saw, and whatnot, and you just clear everything out that doesn't look like it belongs. Order is the word for the day, and I am happy.

Spring comes along, and all the plants decide to take on new “features”. All the little blooms are blooming. The grass begins to grow again, the leaves, following the blooms, start poking out again. Soon enough, the inner branches of the trees and bushes will be hidden, their stark simplicity replaced by a cacophony of colors and a blanket of clorophyll producing/consuming energy systems. It all looks good, but man! What a mess!!

Just so you can understand what follows, I will give you a brief inventory of the flora around my house:

5 50 foot pine trees. Always shedding needles, year round. 1 Giant Poplar. 2 dwarf Cherry (Rainier, Bing). 1 Prune plum, 3 large Bogenvalia, 1 large Cherry blossom, several Rhododendron and Azalia, ground cover here and there, raspberries, Rhubarb, a full vegatable garden, some large hedge type bushes (non descript), holly, this that and the other thing... And that's just the back yard.

The front yard is similarly equipped, although the trees are dogwood, magnolia, 20 roses, several fruit trees (apple, plum, pear), and again with the nasty ground cover I'd like to rip out.

The sides of the house feature more Rhodies, bamboo, of a couple different varieties, japanese maples, juniper type stuff, and some pretty flowering weed that I don't know, but they look like peas.

Now. It's almost a full time job to keep up with all this stuff. At least on the weekends. Oh yah, and there's a full complement of grass in both the front and back. Anyway, keeping up with this stuff is a full time job. I have two large 50 gallon “yard waste” cans, and they find themselves full every week. They only get picked up every other week, so there's no way to keep up really. You have to fill up extra bags and put them out, or take them to the dump separately.

What's striking about all this stuff is, during the winter, it's all completely ignored. I mean zilch, zip, nada. After about October, everthing just shuts down. The temperature drops, the plants die off or go dormant as they see fit, and I turn my attention to wood working, and selling off books. But come spring time, Padow!! There it all is.

This weekend, in order to tame some of the beast, we decided to take out some of the grass in the back yard and build in a perimeter walkway. A very nice idea indeed. Since we want to have strolling brunches sampling of the various fruits and veggies in the garden, we might as well have a nice walking path to make the stroll a pleasant one.

Well, this of course takes a trip to Lowe's. We have to look at what type of path trimmings are available that we like. We decide on these scalloped brick things, because Yasmin thinks they will look cool and are more instresting that the plain old ordinary bricks. OK, we don't buy them immediately, but we do buy a ball of twine to mark the path. Then, back home, stake the path, get out the tape measure, mark it all off. Turns out to be about 130' worth of walkway. This all happened after I used the weed wacker and lawn mower to essentially cut the grass down to dirt so we could actually see what the path might look like.

While I'm busy with this process, Yasmin is clipping some of the the bushes away from the path. It's one of the giant non descript bushes that generates white flowers, then red barries later in the summer. That, and the prune plum tree. This generates another pile of twigs and leaves, that of course won't fit into the already full yard waste container. So, they'll have to be stuffed into bags. But, we have a new feature now, it is a staked out path that almost looks like a path. One or two or three more milestones may be needed to finish the task.

Having staked out the path, we went off to Costco to buy a dvd, and then made a side trip to Home depot to see what they had going in the pavers department. Not as wide a selection as Lowe's so back to Lowe's.

Alright. We need exactly 128 of the 1 foot scalloped things, and 24 of the curved ones to make our curves. Just a little more than we need to account for breakage, and design changes. The nice thing about Lowe's is that they help you with “load out”. That is, the nice guy helped me put all those bricks into the back of my truck so I could get home quickly...

And then... All by myself, I had to take all those bricks and move them up a staircase from the driveway, across the front lawn, up the path, into the back yard, and stack them all nice and neat like. Tenacity, perseverance, perspiration, and a sheer determination, and I had the task done in about an hour.

Now what do we have? In order to clean up the trash, that is, in order to eliminate a bit of green from my back yard, I've increased the yard waste, but chopping down some bushes, generated some grass clippings from clearing out the path, put a huge amount of brick dust in my car, and deposited a number of bricks in a pile to be dealt with. Not to mention the introduction of 20 or so stakes and the accompanying twine.

After the next milestone, this stuff will all be put in its proper place, and all the trash will eventually get cleaned up, even if it does take a couple more seasons. In the end, we'll have a wonderfully organized yard with minimized waste, all nice and tidy and orderly.

As I tucked Yasmin into bed tonight, we started thinking about the things we'll be doing with our newly organized space. Word of forts, with water features dividing them. Park benches, with arbors, gazebos, and waterfalls. In the fullness of time, we'll actually implement all these features. For now, we're just going to have to deal with all the trash we've just generated.

My Media Muscle Machine Might Make Masculine Movies

wadams — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 05:24:00 GMT

I didn't actually watch the whole super bowl. I watched some of the first half, and walked away as soon as the half time show started to make a phone call. The call lasted through the half time show, and pretty much through the second half, and I got busy doing other things anyway. Luckily, I taped the whole 5 hours though.

Tonight, I'm actually exercising a whole other aspect of my media explorations. I'm taking the tape of the super bowl, and saving it digitally. If I were smart, i would have recorded it digitally in the first place, but I simply didn't think there would be any reason to waste hard disk space on it when it started.

So, I used the video capture capabilities of my ATI All-In_Wonder, and turned the roughly 5 hours into 20Gb of data. Do you ever wonder how a game that has 4 quartes of 15 minutes apiece could turn into 5 hours of boredom?

Anyway, using Sonic's “MyDVD”, I'm importing the whole video in to do some editing. It's a neat program because it will automatically do scene detection, and automatically turn those scenes into chapters for your DVD. You can take scenes out, add your own scene boundaries, and play them in whatever order you want.

I think I'm going to make 7 main chapters: Pre Game, 1st Quarter, 2nd Quarter, Half time, 3rd Quarter, 4th Quarter, Post Game wrapup. I might pull the half time show out separately and further break it down into its own chapters. I'm going to remove all the commercials, and create “special features” out of them, eliminating the duplicates and not so special ones. That should leave me with quite a nice little packaged up super bowl experience.

The one thing I missed was capturing the closed captions. But, wait a minute, maybe I did capture them, and I just need to turn them on... I'll figure that out. If I did capture them, then I'll add them to the database. Of course I can add my own caption information anyway.

So, let's see. I'm hoping that without commercials, half-time, cutaways to the booth, I might actually end up with 1.5 hours of pure football in all it's glory.

My home machine is not very fast, and this whole process will take quite a few hours. It will consume a lot of disk space, eat up CPU, and make my machine bleed for speed and want of more memory. But, I can see this is what a lot of people might be doing with their machines in the future. With more digital photography than ever, the digital shoe box will beg to have the media futzed with.

Disk drives sales will continue, the march for faster machines will continue, the barrage of DVD/Videography software will continue, and the world will be a better place.

I'm going off the St Thomas to fill up 512Mb of compact flash with my camera. But that's another story.

I think I know why computers don't work, that is, epistemologically speaking of course

wadams — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 05:08:00 GMT

As Jimmy Carter used to do, I consult my daughter Yasmin on many an issue of great and deep importance. The subject this weekend was why computers crash, have bugs, and all that sort of stuff. I made a bold statement because I wanted to see where we could take it. I said “they have problems because they have no sense of identity“.

A while ago, she raised the question “Who is the 'I' that says 'I'“. We've gone into philosophical and religious discussions based on this very topic. Today, she basically said, “that's a lot of difficulty caused by a single letter“, and then she went back to reading “Dragon Singer“, which isn't about a singing dragon at all.

At any rate, we went on about our day, and on the way over to Krispy Kreme, we broached the subject again, “why don't computers always work?“ This time, I had an even better angle. I said the following.

“This car is transporting us to Krispy Kreme. Without using the words “I“, “We“, or “Us“, can you describe why this is happening?“. She struggled mightily, figuring, refiguring, recasting, and in the end came up with “it's too hard“. I thought to myself “just like when the WHOPPER figured out that there was no good end in thermonuclear war“. That was just the hook I needed. I said, computer programs are like us in the car without identity. The car is like the computer itself. Or visa versa. It's doing whatever it's doing, no matter what. I said, if the car suddenly veered off course, and went off the side of the road, we wouldn't care, and the car would do nothing to correct its course. We're just along for the ride. Without identity, we can't say things like “NO!! We want to go to Krispy Kreme!!“, and recorrect the errant path. There's no “We“ to express such a thought, and the car has no real will of its own. It's only because I have strong desires to get to the donut place that I will make corrections to the car along the way, accounting for adversities of all sorts as they come up. I am adaptable, and I have desire.

Similarly, I said, there's no sense of identity in the computing system, so when a virus comes along and messes with the program, the computer happily continues to execute the infected program because it has no sense or desire to do anything else, because it has no identity of its own. It's just going wherever the code takes it.

To go further, I described the current state of computing as working very hard to make the car more reliable. Random acts are less likely to take us off course. A popped tire is unlikely. An overheated radiator, a tweaked steering system. But, a random asteroid, or drunk driver can always hit us, and since we're merely passengers, we're not going to do too much to correct our course, because we have no desire other than to ride along with wherever the car is going to take us.

We then worked out that it would be nice to put some amount of knowledge/mind into the machine such that it can make some basic decisions. That's when we stumbled on the word “epistemology“. How do you remember such a word? Well, I said “epi“ can be remembered because it's at the center of things, like “epicenter“ of an earthquake. Then there's stem, which is the center of a plant. Then, ology is easy because she already knows things like biology as being the study of something. So, now Yasmin knows the word epistemology as the study of things that are at the center. Good enough, we'll get to the theory of thinking and knowledge soon enough.

Having planted this seed, I'm assuming that Yasmin will come up with the method and aparatus for infusing machines with a mind. Perhaps we'll follow Freud and create an Id, Ego, and Superego system. Who knows. All I know is that in the past (when she was 4) when she was asking the questions like “why is the sky blue, why does the moon appear larger when it's low in the sky“, and the like, I had to turn to the “Handy Physics Answer Book“. I figure by turning these problems over to her early, we'll get a generational head start on solving them.

Well, we got our donuts, we headed home, and Yasmin finished the “Dragon Singer“ for the fifth time before turning in. I'm glad she's on my side, and I hope the pity she feels for the poor dumb computers leads her to answering the “who am I?“ question for them.

Legacy Lags Listlessly Lurching towards the future

wadams — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 07:13:00 GMT

What is “legacy data”? I thought about this because at work we talk about 'legacy data' all the time. As if the data being stored in the future will be current, and the data stored today is old crufty and undesirable.

Having installed another 120Gb in my machine, I rapidly filled it up with some more legacy DVD data. Storing the data itself is relatively painless. A full DVD takes anywhere from 7-20 minutes to archive, depending. Then there's that extra step of trying to get the subtitles turned into text from their bitmap form. That takes another manual tedious 20 minutes.

The sad thing is, I'm sure there are other people in the world who are doing this last tedious step, and in the spirit of friendliness, they've probably uploaded the subtitles in text form somewhere.

Sure enough, there is a site that allows you to search for subtitle files: http://www.allsubtitles.exits.ro They have a web interface, and produce a program called “SubsFinder”. It's a nifty thing because you just type in the title of the movie, what language you want it in, and press 'Go'. If they have it, you download it, and you're all set.

So, now my process for archiving just became that much easier. I archive the disk, which doesn't take very long at all. I do a search on allsubtitles to see if they have the text. If they do, then I'm done. If not, then I spend the extra time later to transcode the subtitles to text.

But, this is all legacy data isn't it? I mean the disks have already been manufactured. Certainly it can't be valuable information. Certainly if it were interesting it would be stored in some database quickly accessible. Certainly we'd have products available already that would seamlessly integrate this information into our lives showing how pertinant it is to our very existance.

I've come to the conclusion that everything on my hard disk is legacy data. No sooner do I archive some content, than someone else somewhere on the planet has already done the same exact thing. Yes, I will have a terabyte of storage, but “my data” won't all be on my machine. In the future, all the data of the world will be 'my data', and I will be able to access it all through the internet. I may store some of the vast pool of human knowledge on my machine locally, but realistically, that's just so that it can serve as a local cache for performance reasons.

There's no such thing as legacy data. There is just data. Whether it was created long ago, or in the future does not matter. What matters is I want to get to it in intelligent ways. I don't want to always move it forward as the 'legacy' label might suggest. I want to access it as it is, in place, using intelligent tools and agents.

I've archived all my CDs. I've made it through almost all of my DVDs (I'll need another 100Gb to make it all the way). Now I'm looking at buying a high resolution scanner to capture my old photo negatives that existed before the dawn of the digital camera age

“Legacy Data” is the world's memory. Making that memory readily available in relatively easy fashion is going to be very interesting.

Archived Media Makes Marvelous Movies

wadams — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 06:18:00 GMT

I've archived a large number of DVDs to my hard disk. If you have non-copyrighted material, say weddings and whatnot, on DVD, you can use DVDDecrypter to store the content on your hard disk. It has this neat mode (ISO Read) that pretty much just copies the entire disk to your machine as an ISO image. You could then write that image file out to a DVD Writer, and you'd have a duplicate of your most precious wedding DVD.

The interesting thing to me though, is the other things you can do with your content. For example, using the same program, you can demux the DVD into its constituent parts. In particular, you can split out the video as MPEG-2, and the audio as .AC3, or whatever the encoding so happened to be. Once you do that, you can do other things.

Now, I'm trying to make my media content available over my home network so that I can watch a movie or play music from anywhere in the house. I want to store it all on the “media server”, which is to be a fairly beefy machine running Windows 2003 Server, with Media Services enabled. The media services basically allow for media streaming, either as broadcast, or unicast.

If I can turn my content into Windows Media Video 9 format, then I'll be golden. It turns out that part of the free downloads for Windows Media 9 is the Windows Media Encoder program. This is a really neat piece of machinery. You simply indicate where your audio is stored, and where the accompanying video is, and tell it what data rate, video sight, and other parameters you like, and start encoding. At the end of what may be a very long session on an underpowered machine such as mine, you will get this nice .wmv file that will be a nice representation of your content in streaming media format.

This is way cool. There is one step you have to perform once you get your content from your original DVD though. You have to convert the .AC3 stream into a .wav file, but there's a utility program called AZid that helps you do that part.

So, I've got a strategy. Copying the original content of my DVDs to the hard disk in the entirety seems like a good idea. It's a permanent record that's a bit more easily accessible than the original DVDs. Since my hard disk is faster than my DVD drive, it makes further processing much faster. It's also a legitimate archiving mechanism because if I lose, break, burn, or otherwise destroy one of my $15 DVDs, I can press a new desk from my desktop. That seems like a good thing. Also, whenever I want to create a movie of a specific size for a specific purpose, I can always transcode from the original sources.

Now, I'm looking back at the 100 or so CDs that I've archived, and I'm thinking I will go through the whole process all over again. When I first archived them, I used one of the lossy compression ratios. I was thinking I would be archiving them for playback. But, after doing this little job on the DVDs, I'm thinking it would be good to have the CDs as pristine copies of originals as well. it takes up more space, but that's why I keep buying 100Gb disk drives.

At the same time that I'm archiving my wedding DVDs, I'm getting the sub title information off them at the same time. I plan on putting those into a database so that I can do content searches to find interesting stuff. Given that the DVDs will be available online, it begins to get interesting. I can imagine being able to archive some National Geographic, or Discovery Channel DVDs and pull up scenes by content for Yasmin's various reports. That will be way cool.

Basically, I'm turing my media into searchable content that can be used for more than just entertainment. This is a good thing for book/learning people such as ourselves, we have ready access to a library of Congress amount of information right here on our little server at home.

So, that's how it is. Rip snortin fast archiving and retrieval of massive amounts of information. I wonder if I can query and present this information in a better way...

I guess that's another story.

The Prince - Presents Positively Passionate Political Platitudes

wadams — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 04:42:00 GMT

Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince

Penguin Classics - ISBN 0-14-044752-0

I've been reading this of late. It's interesting. This Machiavelli guy (1469-1527) is talking about statecraft, and makes many observations as to how things have come about in the Europe that he lived in. Lots of tales of Papal pontiffs, politicians, patriarchs, and the like. If it were an operate, there would be many patricians in tights singing in Italian with plenty of blood and guts.

It's interesting because it's old stuff, yet it is new again. There are interesting section headings such as “How a prince should organize his troops”, “How cities or principalities which lived under their own laws should be administered after being conquered”, and the like.

It's like a training manual with case studies on how various princes should go about ruling their principalities depending on how they came to them in the first place. “New principalities acquired by one's own arms and prowess”.

In modern terms, I think the precepts and concepts can be applied to modern business situations. Tonight I read about the Michael being dismissed as the Master of Mickey. Certainly a coupe in the making. Since spring is in the air, there are certainly a round of mergers and acquisitions, reorgs, and whatnot across the computer industry. It will be interesting to see what patterns these various machinations appear to be following. Having recognized the beginning of one pattern, I'd like to read to the end of the associative chapter in the book to see how it's going to end.

A more modern treatment of a similar subject is “The 48 Laws of Power”, Rober Greene. Also from Penguin ISBN- 0-14-028019-7

This one has such sage advice as “Win through your actions, never through argument”.

41 - Avoid stepping into a great man's shoes

46 - Never appear too perfect

47 - Do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory, learn when to stop

They each go into great detail with case studies to prove the point, and teach how to avoid the pitfalls. Interesting stuff.

So, I look at my modern landscape with “The Prince” and “48 Laws” as guiding lights. I see what we are doing in the computer industry, and I simply think “interesting”.

Coax Capabilities Come to Computer

wadams — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 05:30:00 GMT

So,

This past weekend, I pushed further ahead with my home office rearrangement project. Having detreasured the downstairs, and having move my center of computing upstairs, there was just one more thing to move. I left one of the computers downstairs (the media archiving PC) because that's where the cable was running. There, and into my bedroom.

I really had no other reason for having the PC down there other than the fact that the cable was available down there. So, I endeavored to install a cable line into my new office space. Seeing as how I did so well while installing the phone line, I figured this would be a piece of cake.

Well, I didn't drill a hole through any existing cables this time, but I did have my challenges. I went to Fry's Electronics because I figured they have everything. I thought I'd pick up the coax cable, the connectors, and the special crimping tool. Well, they had the cable, but it was expensive. They had the connectors, but not the crimping tool. Ah well, why don't I pick up a DeskStar disk drive while I'm here... Nah, it's a wash.

So, off to the Fremont district to look into some hydroponics equipment.. But, that's another story.

So, I eventually went to the hardware store. I was able to get 500' of cable for $38, and they had the connectors, and the special crimping tool. Fry's has dropped in my estimation as the be all end all destination for electronics. I got the cable, drilled a hole in my garage wall, ran the cable up top, into the hole that I drilled, up into the closet. Sounds easy yes? Well, yah, except I initially had the wrong connectors, I cut the cable too short, I didn't have an extension fitting to finish the job, and the computer was downstairs.

Well, today, all is well. I moved the computer upstairs, I connected the extra length of cable that was needed, and now my archiving PC sits, humming peacefully, in the closet, with it's cable attached.

This is really cool because the way things are setup, I can be busily typing on my computer while Yasmin's using the other one at the same time. I can easily watch TV while I work if I like (I could already do this with the laptop anyway), and my basement is devoid of computer equipment.

Now that the basement is more open, having stripped the shelves of aging books, and removed the computers, and other various and sundry items, what will I do?

Well, now it's time to get one of those projectors, some nicer movie couches, and beef up the whole entertainment system with large scale noisy speakers and the like. That, or I'll increase my investment in exercise equipment, adding a rowing machine, and universal weight machine to the bike rollers. That, or rent the space out to a starving artist. That, or setup the hydroponics down there and start growing stuff during the non-sunny season.

Who knows. For now, I have my computing center setup in one place. I have that room nice and decluttered. I'm happy as a pig in slop, and I want to write some code.

On the cut list

wadams — Mon, 23 Feb 2004 03:23:00 GMT

Through the closets and shelves downstairs, what do I find? Selective issues of Dr. Dobb's Journal, dating as far back as 1993, to 1998. At some point I think I had a subscription, and I thought I'd be referring to these things over time. Turns out that you can get it all online, on CDs, and various other venues.

Interesting headings:

Unlocking Encryption Algorithms - Well Bruce Schneier created a few books on the subject, and runs Counterpane Software (http://www.counterpane.com). I bought his “Applied Cryptography” book (1st and 2nd Editions). Then of course there's the TwoFish book. Now I'm ready to recycle them because the work has advanced and these references can all be had online. Bruce Charges a lot of money to get his software on a CD, but, you can find it all online if you're industrious.

Morphing Magic - Became a book, I bought it, then replaced it with a more rigorous book later.

Visual Programming - Used to be big, and there were probably big conferences on it. Nowadays. With the advent of Java and sloppy programming, we can produce many more bugs more quickly with a simple editor, so we don't need this visual assistance. I'm thinking Intentional Programming will actually be the next big breakthrough in this area.

Object Oriented Programming - Now that's gotta be hot. I wonder if I should keep that one?

Oh, and look, there's one on this thing called XML. That one might be hot one day. I better hold onto it just in case I need to refer back to that complex syntax they talked about. And on and on it goes. 10 years of magazines that seemed extremely interesting at the time, but are nothing more than online references at this point.

Well, I'm a programming guy, and I'm sure there's some sort of programming analogy I can draw here. One trend I see by investigating this past is what turned out to be truly important, and what turned out to be more short term fads. Undocumented NT and Netware core protocol? Net What?

How about Persistence for C++, Distributed computing and component objects? And my favorite, Optimizing VRML!!

I guess the point would be, when things get really good, they get preserved. Yah some things that aren't particularly good get preserved some time too, but in general I think this is true.

Since I work on XML, I wonder, what parts of it will be the parts that I'll be throwing away as esoterica, and which parts will be getting preserved in a more permanent form, perhaps as part of a language. Looking into this crystal ball, and making good choices for the future is what our jobs are all about.

SGML, the genesis of XML, has a lot of crufty esoteric stuff. If it didn't, there never would have been a need for XML. XML itself is even starting to get some cruft. There is now this 1.1 thing, namespaces, XSD, and whatnot. What do you make of it? What parts of this will be the Dr Dobb's 1993 issue on the beauties of Netware, and which parts will be longer lasting?

Only time will tell for sure, but in the meanwhile, we'll influence and shape the outcome, doing enough things right such that history will have plenty to choose from in determining how foresightful we were today.

From Queen Ida to JaRule

wadams — Sat, 21 Feb 2004 07:49:00 GMT

About 3 years ago I went through a transformation. I discovered that there was a ton of music that I wanted to listen to. I never was much for the Napster craze, so I actually went out and bought a bunch of CDs. I just counted, and I have about 100 of them.

Although I have a pretty nice AV system, it's down in the “entertainment room” (basement). It's nice enough to go down there and listen to things every once in a while, but I find that I want to listen to music everywhere in the house. So, of course I'm archiving all those CDs to my hard disk. I went out to Fry's and bought a 160Gb drive. So far, my music takes up about 4Gb. Not much to speak of so far. Maybe that will expand to about 10Gb.

I struggled mightily about what format to save the music in. As raw PCM data, CDs are roughly .5Gb per disk, depending. So, my library of 100 disks would be roughly 50Gb of data. Maybe that would be an ok thing. The data would be stored in raw form, and I could always recompress to whatever format was appropriate depending on however else I intended to use it. Maybe I'll go through the whole process again, but for now, I'm using Windows Media Player 9 to do my archiving. I chose to store the files in .wma format at 160kbit. This gives a good enough sound reproduction for my purposes, and a better compression ration than equivalent .mp3.

Oh yah, I bought a nicer DVD player recently. It's this panasonic 5 disk changer that will play just about anything from VCD to .mp3 and most importantly .wma. And yah, it does DVDs as well.

At any rate, I'm busy archiving all of my audio files. After that, I'm going to archive all of my DVDs. I have about 40 of those. Each DVD can take up 4.5 to 9 Gb on a disk (in the raw). With my new disk, I can probably store all of my DVDs, but I won't have room for much else. Of course, if I want to compress them, I can get them down to about .5Gb per movie. Then they'd only take up 20Gb. Even if I double their space, which would make them pretty respectable, it would only take up 40Gb. So, that's 10Gb for my audio, and 40 Gb for my videos. 50Gb total.

OK, I have another 10 or so VHS tapes. That ought to be good for a few Gb, let's call it 60Gb total. Now I'm down to only 100Gb available.

Right now I'm watching some Stargate SG-1. Maybe I could record that every week for a while, and maybe I could even download all the NPR shows that I listen to, and then there's the digital camera. At 256Mb per trip out in the wild, that adds up to a bit much, then the digital video from the other camera, and... well, surely I can fill this 160Gb disk in a year or so. I could probably fill another one every couple of years after that. By the time I'm up to a terabyte, I'm sure I'll be able to plug one of those into my machine and keep on filling.

I'm exhausted just thinking about it. The question that nags me most though is this: How am I going to find anything in all that data? I mean, most of the stuff is going to be loaded into Media Player's library. Of course Microsoft software is good, but I don't know how much testing we've done with much data. Media Player is pretty decent with the amount of data that I have in there right now. It has playlists, genre lists, album lists, artist lists, recently played lists, most played lists, and just about any way you want to find anything through a list interface. Then there's the search, if that's all not good enough.

With all that, I'm not sure I'll be able to find that song where they say “jump to the rhythm jump jump to the rhythm jump“. As I get older, I won't be able to remember these sorts of things. And what about that video where all those balloons flew up in the air and the kids spun around and fell down? And what was that song playing during that commercial for the new Honda?

Interesting. Where is all that data coming from? Well, there's MPEG 7, and it's an XML Format, and there can be lots of interesting data in there. I'm sure it will become the broadcast format once HDTV gets into full swing, or at least there will be lots of archived video that will have MPEG7 streams to go with them.

Will there be a new search mechanism to go with it? Is XQuery good enough? Are XPaths something that I will cozy up to while I'm doing my searches? Will my mother want to use this? How about natural language? With that be up to the task? Will it work internationally? These questions keep me up at night. How am I going to find my stuff, once I've found a place for it?

Maybe this has to do with “Trustworthy Computing“. Perhaps my machine will build a personal profile on me over time and know better what I'm trying to find than I do myself.

So, I'll keep archiving all of my stuff, and keep putting all of my images on the machine. As my disk is filling up, I'll think about how the heck I'm going to find my stuff later, and then I'll go back to work and start thinking about how I'm going to help everyone else do that in the future as well.

All things old become new again

wadams — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 07:18:00 GMT

As I'm perusing various blogs, I'm reminded of two things. BBS, and “Snow Crash”. The first one reminds me of my Commodore PET, and my 300 baud modem. Of course there was FidoNet also operative at the time. But, it was basically a “community”...(read more)