HDR photos

In a few years (5 to 10?) we’ll look at current color photos and think of them like we think of black and white photos now. “Real” pictures will be High Dynamic Range pictures.

That will be nice.

The new Canon A650IS takes away the shakes, has enough pixels (12meg), and handles low light ok, so now I find the limiting factor is dynamic range.

The Great Oil Crisis of 2008

A couple things seem interesting about the recent oil price spike:

  1. Where is the “Oil Crisis”?
  2. Where is the mention of the trash-by-the-freeway effect?

Huh?

  • Consider #1. If it were 1973 or 1979 (gas-line years in the States), buckets of ink and hours of heavy-breathing news anchors would have beaten the “oil crisis” in to us. Why not this time? Is it because Nixon and Carter aren’t president? Not literally “because” of them, perhaps (though a silly argument could be made for that), but rather, is the mind-set that yielded Nixon and Carter as presidents no longer with us – even in the media!

    (Just to be clear, a “crisis” is what we have when someone wants to “do something”. If you don’t know what that means, wait a few years and watch the results of a few “do something-ings”. Hint: The guy who wanted to “do something” will never, ever mention it until they have successfully shifted the blame.)

    Or is this “oil crisis” missing to only me simply because I’m not exposed to these media guys. Every few nights, does NightLine lead off with a dramatic graphic mocking The Onion’s “War for the White House”, followed by talking heads wringing their hands and pronouncing this week’s events a turning point in the history of mankind and proof that there is no end to the “crisis”. …Uh. … Ah. … Is NightLine still on TV? … Whatever.

    My bet is that there is a different attitude out there from the one that was prevalent in the ’70s. The air’s simply been cleared. We don’t breath that stench any more.

    Consider what a true and beautiful thing that is, oh you who bemoan today’s world.

  • #2: A queue or flow system flowing near a critical density will crystalize from the occasional, tiny distraction. Think of how a piece of cardboard blowing slightly toward the traffic lane of a packed, fast-flowing freeway can cause a 1 hour traffic jam. You have driven through such a big slowdown but have seen no cause for it.

    The was no “cause”.

    Such slowdowns are a natural characteristic of dense, flowing material in this universe.

    The way I understand the world’s oil system is that it’s a flow of material from underground muck to hot air thousands of miles away. The “oil” changes hands many times. It’s a huge system and highly, highly optimized. There are predictable elements to it – both on the source end and on the sink end. But, it’s so leanly built that the predictability is optimized out of the system. Leaving a classic, saturated, queue/flow system.

    Which leaves us with “This will happen. You can’t predict it.”

    That is not satisfying. … Hence, we have plenty of left-brains ready to supply an explanation for why the coin, this year, came up heads.

    There is actually a reason why I’m guessing that a large part of the oil price spike was simply a traffic jam. I looked all around and found no information that accurately filtered from the “price” of oil the effect of the dollar’s drop against other currencies. Of course, there are calculations out there, but they sure looked like horseshoes and bombing. If the effect of the kahuna of “explanations”, the dollar’s value, is a wild guess then one might suppose that the oil guys who were stuck in the traffic jam simply didn’t know when that jerk right ahead of ’em would get off the d****d phone and move, for Christ’s sake!

    Quick argument against this: Where are the traffic jams in food? It’s an old story that “major cities only have 3 days of food; we’re all gonna starve; blah, blah, blah”. The food chain is very evolved and optimized. Where are the (mathematically) catastrophic spikes in the system? Answers I can think of off hand:

    1. Major cities have a lot more food stocked than 3 days’ worth.
    2. There are many alternatives to each type of food. This makes the system robust in the same ways that non-deterministic packet switching systems are robust compared to older systems, and in the same way that traffic flow is more robust through a grid-pattern city than through a more modern, flow-controlled, tributary-to-artery system.
    3. Hey! Remember the toilet paper “crisis”? Well, toilet paper’s kinda like food.
    4. And, panicing lunatics played the OH MY GOD! ALL THE RICE IS GONE FROM COSTCO! card this year.

      So, maybe there are serious traffic jams in the food system.

Scattering MegaSystem to Ubuntu/XP – Part 2

Lots of particular lessons learned.

Here’s the latest:

If Ubuntu’s System Monitor program and the Linux “top” program are to be believed about CPU and RAM usage, then modern computers are not memory or CPU bound.

They are disk bound.

After 30+ years of being RAM bound.

Now, spring is a modern, dual core Intel with 8 gig of memory. The CPU is rarely busy to any extent. Memory use doesn’t go above 3 or 4 gig after running for a couple weeks – with the XP VM running, remember. And lots of other things running (including throwing away those 20-30k emails every day).

But.

But, the cursor freezes – especially in the VM. And there are long delays in routine operations while the disk drive is busy, chattering to itself.

Test it yourself: rsync a 400 gig drive’s contents to your main drive. Don’t expect things to work well while this is going on. Programs will spend a lot of time in hourglass mode, whether they show the 11th century timepiece of not. It’s bizarre how the VM’s XP’s cursor goes in to mondo-lag mode, too. Huh? What’s going on? Is the cursor location cached to disk in a blocking thread?

This is interesting because of the current transition in mass storage.

Let’s review.

1) The optical guys muffed the transition up from DVD. Yeah, you can’t beat the media price of optical. 10x under hard disk. But that boat left the dock and they missed it futzing around with Blu-Ray/HDVD/whatever wars. It’s over. The gamers and Hollywood might use these things to pack better quality stuff and more content on ’em. But the computer world simply doesn’t have any need for cheap storage in the 10-100 gig range. Maybe not even in the 100-1000 gig range! Hard drives are too cheap and they don’t have the insert-the-11-teenth CD problem. Hard drives provide the bottomless bucket in which to put stuff now. Thumb drives and CDs satisfy the sneaker-net need.

2) NAND flash has plummeted in price. It’s possible to get a working drive for a couple hundred bucks and that will drop in a year.

The latter, I figure, is the reason why the drive manufacturers’ stock prices look like buggy whip companies. The Wall Street guys may all be running flash drives in their laptops already.

I have also figured a couple of things:

1) You can’t have too much storage. You’ll fill it with video and the like. And dupes. And backups. And history of everything ever done on your system, or seen or heard by your system, or whatever.

2) Hard drives are still staying 10x cheaper than flash.

And wondered, can a hard drive with some brains and a few gig of cache look like a terabyte flash drive?

The predicted death of disk drives (caused by bubble memory) was my key, early lesson to ignore hysteria-hype. Since learning that lesson I’ve only bought in to two hysteria-hyped things (with, by definition, no false negatives):

  1. The internet.
  2. Leave #2 for another time.

Heck, I even backed off predicting the death of CRT tubes for all these years. By the time it finally happened, it had been hashed over so many times that it was, “Uh. Yeah. Finally. … So, how ’bout them Ducks?”.

So, that’s it. Time for a fast hard drive.

Scattering MegaSystem to Ubuntu/XP – Part 1

Email stopped coming in.

I dropped the 11+ year tranzoa.com web hoster. What I said to the guys at AZC.com: “You don’t shut off someone’s email without telling them, dictionary spam surge or no. And, you don’t tell them to use gmail. Not on a $33 a month service … in 2008.”

So, poor asuka (aka tranzoa.net) almost worked its aged, 128meg, 200mhz Pentium II heart out hosting tranzoa.com.

gina (aka bran) overflew its 1 gig system disk and floundered its powerhouse, dual Pentium II 250mhz, 512mb trying to process email to the tune of 20k – 30k spams a day. It’s amazing what a 9 year old, $100 Boeing Surplus machine can do in a pinch.

The old ViewSonic 21″ secondary monitor faded to dark.

The replacement box, spring, took a week to find a working motherboard from Fry’s and had a hard disk failure in a month (power outage – maybe not something to even notice except that it failed on some data needed to boot).

To get spring running I managed to toast MegaSystem’s motherboard. This was not well timed.

For perhaps good reasons, perhaps not, spring’s OS is Ubuntu H 64. The new Megasystem XP runs in a VMWare box. That’s the theory. In practice, I have spent a boatload of time moving much of my personal computing operation to spring’s Ubuntu. Browser, email, IM, picture editing and much of the housekeeping stuff built over years.

This would be the fun part of computing if I were a computer person. Remember the verified, 70’s observation: “Normal people expect computers to treat them badly. Computer people demand it.”

I am not even a normal person. Computers exist for me, not the other way around. At 10 years old, I claimed as much while half-stepping arithmetic homework. And, I claimed right.

This has not been the fun part of computing.

Ah, well. I lied. There was one fun part. Since MegaSystem was dead, its 3 gig of RAM fit rather nicely in Scott’s old “tara” box with the Auburn VO stickers and all. So, to keep the status quo, asuka is still running on antiquated hardware. It’s just running on 10x the CPU and 20x the RAM. Makes a difference. Doesn’t take 5 minutes to deliver a web page, for instance.

Earth on a pool table

Many years ago I read that if the Earth were the size of a cue ball, it would be as smooth and round as a cue ball.

That was startling.

And I questioned it. Along the lines of, well, Mauna Loa rises about 5 miles off the seafloor. And the Mariana Trench goes down about 6 miles. So, could you feel Mauna Loa as a bump or the Mariana Trench as a groove?

OK, a pool ball is a bit over 2 inches in diameter and the Earth is about 8000 miles through the center. So, a mile would be about 1/4000th of an inch on the Earth-ball. 5 or 6 miles makes these two extremes, Mauna Loa and the Mariana Trench, about 1/1000th of an inch on the Earth-ball.

To get a line on how big 1/1000th of an inch is, I pulled out my Autologic printer’s loop and found that the steps leading up to the Lincoln Memorial on the back of a $5 bill are about 5/1000ths of an inch apart. The horizontal lines that are the sky in the Memorial picture are double that at about 1/100th of an inch apart. To my eyes the sky looks like lines when looked at closely. The steps look gray.

Another estimate of now much 1/1000ths of an inch is: Thin paper runs 2 or 3 1000ths of an inch in thickness. Normal paper is in the 4 to 8 range.

The bump at the edge of a piece of paper is easy to feel.

But Mauna Loa would be pretty small – not a long cliff like the edge of a piece of paper. Just one bump. And the bump wouldn’t be a lot wider than it is high – triple, say. Maybe that Earth-ball might feel vaguely blemished to a blind movie hero, but it sure would feel pretty smooth to people who work with their hands.

That isn’t the end of things.

I wondered about that Earth-ball.

For instance, what would it feel like?

Consider that the Earth is covered by ocean a couple of miles deep, on average. Would the Earth-ball feel sorta like it just came in from the cold – steamed up? That’d be about the most that could be detected of the oceans.

If the atmosphere were solid, it would be a paper-thin shell around the whole Earth-ball.

And speaking of paper-thin shells around the Earth-ball, that’s about what the Earth’s crust would be.

Which gets to the fun point:

What if set an Earth-ball down on a pool table? What would happen?

Tick, tick, tick.

Best I can figure is it would expand a bit and burn its way through to the floor, splatting out as a lump of molten metal and lava. The Earth, after all, appears to be like a balloon with the rubber part being cool rock and the air inside replaced by soft, hot rock, or molten metal, or iron that’s so compressed it’s solid.

Here’s a to-scale picture I found at http://einstein.byu.edu/~masong/HTMstuff/textbookpdf/C30.pdf:

Earth Structure

The mantle is hot rock. The core, liquid and solid, is iron. Or so it’s believed. There is no question that it gets hot going down in the crust. Deep mines get real hot – unlivably hot.

Side note: The density of the Earth is almost identical to the density of Radium – at room temperature and pressure. Which isn’t like 2000 miles under the Earth. But, hey, who’s counting?

Anyway, this whole line of thought raises the question:

What keeps the outer shell of the Earth cool?

XP SP3 Install

Wherein I promote a fleeting computer experience to cosmic proportions…

It was a slow night of continuing to get nothing done, so I figured, “Why not go ahead and do the XP SP3 update?” Why not, indeed.

Let’s go back to the late ’70’s or early ’80’s. At the time I called Microsoft “the GM of 2020”. Remember GM – General Motors? They are still around, losing a few billion dollars now and then. Cadillac and Saturn are both GM cars. GM makes some other cars, too. Something called a Chevrolet, for instance. Sold to corporate/government fleets, one must suppose. Anyway, back in the day, GM was the company. And my faith in computers said Microsoft would be the company in 2020.

Fast forward to 2000 or so, when Microsoft made their catastrophic decision to not split up in the face of being IBM’d by the feds. That was jolting. Microsoft had done a very good job of not catching the monopoly disease, but they took a wrong turn with that decision. The pundits said that Microsoft had rolled the feds. I was never sure what these guys were smoking. Microsoft is a rounding error on the fed’s budget. Charles Atlas can’t roll an aircraft carrier. Microsoft decided, in brief, to acknowledge that they were no longer a private company but were an adjunct of the US government. Brussels, too, continues to claim a piece of ’em! Sad.

But I bought the stock. Heck. They were local. They had a lot of strengths and were fundamentally in great shape and would be for a long, long time.

Since Bubble 1, though, the big, center parts of Microsoft have been drifting. Their treatment of IE is a perfect micro-picture – ignored until the world has long passed them by. Then a sort of a “me too” upgrade.

They had caught the monopoly disease.

A couple of years ago, I test-installed Ubuntu on a new, vanilla box. Then, for fun, also installed the Vista RC1. Hmmm. Ubuntu struck me as very competitive against Windows from a few years before then. Ubuntu was “getting there,” but not quite “there.” It could have been called quite different from, but equivalent to Vista. Not quite up to XP level.

Recently, Ballmer decided that it would be a good idea … here’s the punch line … to buy Yahoo.

I sold the stock.

A week or two ago I upgraded ‘alexlap’, the 7-8 year old Ubuntu Dell laptop. This upgrade was to Ubuntu “H”, Hardy Heron. 3 problems:

1) 2 obscure config files fussed about being changed and what should be done about them?

2) With those 2 files, I experimented with the option to see the “differences side-by-side.” The side-by-side display is unusable. And the UI flow is a little disconcerting when you step through the options to check out the config file differences. You can’t go wrong, but you’re given a single, ambiguous button after you view the “side-by-side” comparisons.

3) Apache (custom installed on ‘alexlap’s desktop version of Ubuntu) didn’t start up properly. Apparently, the machine name, “alexlap”, is used somewhere in Apache’s configuration. I’d not put “alexlap” in /etc/hosts as a special name. Or something.

Put another way, the upgrade went very smoothly. Surprising, as the previous “G” upgrade from “F” presented a lot more fussing to ignore. And the laptop is unquestionably unusual hardware stocked with extra programs left over from various experiments and tests.

So, last night it was XP SP3 time for my main PC. This PC is a stock box, already completely up to date with respect to Windows Update.

Result: Infiniboot.

Here’s the nice part about the XP update experience: They offer, as a pop-up when Windows is booted in Safe Mode, something called “System Restore”. I tried it because of the reassuring message that the “restore” could be undone. The system booted OK after it was “restored” to a couple of days in the past. So there is the good and troubling news: The Windows mechanism to handle catastrophic failure is quite smooth.

Cosmic conclusion: No new information. Microsoft should make a note to wake up when Apple’s consumer share shoots past 30. Can you say “Christmas 2008?” Is Microsoft on the road to specializing in fleet sales of their Impala of OS against a world of Crown Vic Linuxes?

Dreams

I woke up to a disturbing dream the other day. It made me think again about how our days are colored by our dreams – affected more than is anywhere mentioned by adults. Yes, we know that kids can have bad dreams and, because young kids’ dream worlds are so mixed with the real world, we know how much the two worlds influence each other. But we think we “grow out” if such things.

I doubt it.

I’ve woken up laughing from hilarious dreams a couple times over the last year. And, golly, the day sure felt better for such a good start. Oddly enough, one of the dreams was of an airplane spiraling to the earth. What was belly laughable about that escapes me just now, but … well, you had to be there. Anyway, it could have been a simple flying dream and the airplane was doing aerobatics – wonderful, funny, surprising aerobatics.

So, how do you encourage happy dreams, fun dreams, warm dreams?

The personal device connectivity dam

Verizon is talking about opening up their network to phones not sold through Verizon. Is this the start of something big?

Well, that question leads to this long ramble on the sorry state of personal device connectivity.

First, let’s do the overview:

Personal devices follow PCs by 10 to 12 years. That is, when you whip your phone out of your pocket, you are grabbing a 12 year old PC – adjusting for form factor changes and such.

We can expect what happened a decade ago in the PC world to happen in the personal device world today.

So, what happened 10 to 12 years ago in the PC world?

Easy question. Win95 came out! A working, widely used, multi-tasking OS for PCs. Oh. And the Internet. But, hey, finally, after all these years, on an obscure blog, Win95 gets credit for being the enabler of the “Internet” as it’s thought of today.

Back to personal devices and Verizon.

There are plenty of calls for a CarterPhone decision for the cellular industry. Is the Verizon announcement a step toward the same end goal?

Yep. But, it’s a phone company step. The devil’s in the details. Apparently, the device/phone maker must get the device qualified by Verizon. That could be a step similar to that which land line phone devices must take. (They need FCC clearance.) Of course, that you, the phone maker, need to get the approval stamp from Verizon implies you need the same stamp from N other phone companies. Not gonna happen, folks.

Oh well. Anyway, the Verizon announcement can be cheered as a crack in the wall.

We’ll see the herd of carriers respond. Expect a variant of the Verizon announcement from the GSM guys. If the carriers get in a downhill snowball rolling contest, then things could get exciting. For starters, the GSM guys could, for instance, band together with a single point of device validation and skip individual carrier validation.

BTW, let’s look at CarterPhone a bit.

Before CarterPhone, two things were true:

  1. You could not hook a non-Bell phone to the network.
  2. You paid for each extension phone you got from Bell.

Usually, when people think of CarterPhone, they think of thing 1.

Consider, though, thing 2 in a cell phone world.

What if you could run 6 cell “phones” on the same account at the same time? Sure, thing 1 would be true, too. That is, you could get these phones from anywhere. But the interesting thing is thing 2.

Now think about the Amazon Kindle.

Never mind its misfortune of having no market (as the gadget geeks’ $400 bills are all going to iPhones at this time).

Never mind its misfortune of not being available for evaluation. (Do you see them at Frys and CompUSA?)

What’s interesting about the Kindle in the context of the Verizon announcement is this: what we’ll be seeing when the dam finally breaks on device connectivity are a lot of “extension phones” – that are not “phones” at all!

Forget thing 1: being able to buy a phone from someone other than your carrier. If you use a GSM carrier (e.g. in the US, not Sprint or Verizon), you’ve had that ability for a long time (except, of course, that you must still buy a phone from the carrier on easy, monthly installment payments – whether you get an actual phone for your payments or not).

What you’re seeing with the Kindle is yet another odd-ball device that can really leverage ubiquitous connectivity. Once the dam breaks, you’ll soon be carrying several of these devices. And your exoskeleton (a.k.a. your “car”, “automobile”, “wheels”) is sure to sport a gob of such devices. Remember that the limiting factor on personal devices is power. Your exoskeleton has unlimited power available all the time, relatively speaking.

Which gets to: why do exoskeletons not provide a device platform? Odd, that. The manufacturers even pay Apple to connect to iPods! The car guys of the year 1910 must be spinning in their graves.

Internet oddity

Have you ever noticed that Google has skipped a UI beat in Google Maps and Google Earth?

Try entering a latitude / longitude value to either.

Unless you get it exactly right, both systems fuss and stonewall.

Why?

Is there some silly patent out there?

Anyway, it turns out that parsing lat/lon gets dirty fast. Sort of like parsing arbitrary time/dates.

Here’s a shot: /cgi-bin/latlon_cgi.py.

Har, har. Should someone write a GreaseMonkey script to “fix” input to Google Maps with an XMLHttpRequest? That would be keeping in the Web 2.0 river.