I have a bluetooth keyboard and a bluetooth mouse, why do I have a wire running from my computer to my monitor? Well to be fair, I don't as I've got an iMac, but that isn't really the point. Supposing I didn't, and supposing I wanted to connect to my monitor without a pesky wire running between my computer and the monitor.
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| CREDIT: Teq Gear |
Stop heating the up the tar, put away that barrel of feathers, and fire up software update. It looks like Apple have released a firmware update that should fix the unexpected shutdown problem being suffered by the current generation of MacBooks.
The Zettabyte Storage zBox (via CrunchGear and Engadget) is a novel idea. Software like Jungle Disk makes access to Amazon S3 fairly transparent, but this is the first time I've seen a piece of hardware that does the same thing.
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| CREDIT: Zettabyte Storage™ |
On the heels of the update to the MacBook Pro, Apple has also released a MagSafe Airline Power Adaptor. Which is sort of rubbing salt into my wounds, I don't want to buy a 15 or 17-inch MacBook Pro, I want a replacement for my 12-inch Powerbook, and no the 13-inch MacBook is still too large.
This is a really odd thing for Apple to come out with, something like this is designed for the road warrior, and the core demographics of the people buying the current 15 and 17-inch models aren't road warriors, they're the power users. I'm confused here...?
It's been obvious for a while that to keep up with the other manufacturers Apple would have to release a new MacBook Pro with an Intel Core 2 Duo inside. Well, today was the day, and we got our new models.
Along with some friends and in the dim and distant past, around 15 years ago now when I was still an undergraduate, and the web hadn't been invented yet, I ran an LP Mud. It turned out that LPC, the language that you used to create content inside the MUD, was a fairly powerful object-orientated programming language, which did in fact later evolve into a "serious" language called Pike.
It's possible that I wouldn't be doing what I do today if it hadn't been for writing thousands of lines of LPC, it taught me the fundamentals of object-orientated programming in a far more visual way than is normal. If you can "see" the objects being created in front of you, the object-oriented metaphor isn't really a metaphor anymore.
Around the same time, although I didn't read it for years afterwards, Neal Stephenson wrote a book called Snow Crash which established him as one of the better serious science fiction authors of his generation. Unlike many books of the cyberpunk genre, Snow Crash is packed full of dark humour, and satire, and amongst its hideously complicated interweaving plot lines the book discussed how a virtual reality-based Internet, the Metaverse, might evolve in the near future.
When I finally got around to reading Snow Crash about five or six years after Stephenson wrote it, I couldn't help nodding my head. His Metaverse was very similar to what my friends and I had sketched out as the the next step forward for online collaboration. However the hardware and the bandwidth of the time made such a thing virtually impossible, and instead we got the web. But we still wanted the Metaverse, and interim hacks like VRML started to emerge. But as anyone that played around with VRML at the height of its popularity in the late nineties can tell you, the hardware and the bandwidth still weren't there yet.
Hiro is messing around in Flatland...his reason for being in Flatland is that Hiro Protagonist, the last of the freelance hackers, is hacking. And when hackers are hacking they don't mess around with the superficial world of the Metaverse and avatars. They descend below the surface layer and into the netherworld of code and tangled nam-shubs that supports it, where everything you see in the Metaverse, no matter how lifelike and beautiful and three-dimensional, reduces to a simple text file - Neal Stephenson in Snow CrashAs a profession, programmers aren't a dying breed either, no matter what some of the media coverage might have us think. But we are going to have to change, we're going to have to work much more closely with graphic designers, or specialise in the low level code that's behind the scenes from the avatar in the street.
| Second Life: The Official Guide by Michael Rymaszewski, Wagner James Au, Mark Wallace, Catherine Winters, Cory Ondrejka & Benjamin Batstone-Cunningham ISBN 047009608X, paperback, £12.60 |  |
After a taxi, three airports, two flights, two trains, another taxi, and 23 hours of travelling later, I'm back in Exeter...
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| Via Samwise rides again |
I must admit to being incredibly slack about blogging ADASS this year, I used to do a talk by talk account of most of the conferences I went to, about the only one I do that for now is OSCON, when I'm lucky enough to get to go that is...
Of course other people aren't being so slack, although Brad, notorious for being slack about such things, is pretty much in the same position as me having only blogged the day before the conference. Perhaps understandably enough, he's been more interested in earthquakes since.
Overall I think ADASS this year has been a good meeting, there has been some good stuff presented, for instance Andrew Connolly presented the work he's been doing while on sabbatical with Google Pittsburgh. Michelle Borkin talked about using medical imaging software to display astronomy data. We have our own medical physics group at Exeter so I think I'll be talking to them on my return to see if they have any experience with the programs she was discussing.
I've also got a lot of work done, and had a bunch of corridor meetings, and it's amazing how much you can get done with those things. I've even finished writing some code. Which can't be bad. I was getting very depressed about he quality of work presented at ADASS, but it looks like my year away from the conference has been worthwhile. Either everyone has picked up their game, or I've returned with renewed enthusiasm. You can't complain...
Update: More from day 1 at ADASS.
The JAC in Hawaii has released some detailed status information on the condition of UKIRT and JCMT after the earthquake on Sunday.
Update: Looks like other people are taking stock of their earthquake preparedness after Sunday.
Update: The earthquake and after-shocks in Google Earth.
I'm at ADASS right now, so I'm not paying as much attention to my news feed as normal, but it was hard to miss yet more iPhone rumours. I'm no longer going to make any sort of prediction about whether the iPhone really exists, or whether it's ever going to actually ship. We've been talking about this for two years now, enough already...
Update: More from TUAW...
I stayed up last night and wrote some talks, two in fact, both of which I gave today. Unfortunately staying up late meant that the cold I'd been successfully holding off for a week or so finally managed to take a firm hold, and my immune system collapsed under the onslaught. So I'm now having a cold instead of holding one off...
There isn't much news coming out of Hawaii after the earthquake yesterday, but it looks like UKIRT and JCMT have come through intact. During the earthquake JCMT was doing an inclinometry run and Ian Coulson put up a page showing the effects (via Canspice).
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| Posted via Flickr by aallan |
| Peter and the GAIA 3D demo... |
