Getting rid of old machines ...

Sunday was a sad day. Actually it wasn't, but it kind of closed the book on retro computing. We had a couple of old laptops, Judi's old Windows 95 Toshiba that was going to have Damn Small Linux installed on it and never did and an old but working Apple powerbook 520.

The Toshiba was old, the battery was shot but the machine still powered up, but was clearly surplus to requirements. Wiped the disk with DBAN, didn't reinstall an OS (and forgot to mention this to the recyclers at Revolve - naughty!) and that was it. Something that cost $3000 eight years ago is converted to a doorstop. The targus carry case that came with it is probably worth more.

The powerbook was something else. And it has a sort of history attached to it. Long long ago I did some work with archaeologists about taking computers into the field, and typically down wet holes and places that are generally unfriendly to hardware. This eventually turned into me doing an ad hoc presentation at a field archaeology conference in the early nineties.

It also turned into an interest in computing in 'rough' places that you might well travel to but where things were a bit iffy - combined with my interest in travel to exotic places.

About the time I dscovered the palm pilot as the ideal note taker when away from base - something I still think holds, I came up with the idea that retro computing might be an answer to the computers and wet muddy holes problem.

The idea behind retro computing is that you use an old low value computer with a modem (or even back up to floppy disk) for data capture on the basis that if it gets lost or stolen there's no real loss. Hunting about I came up with the Powerbook 520 as the ideal device. Slow and heavy it may be but with a mono, and hence low power screen it had reasonable power consumption with its dual batteries, a modem, and ethernet.

So I decided to try it out and bought one from eBay, with the Apple eternet to UTP gubbins and tried it out. It was surprisingly good, and being a well made machine reliable. The only two downsides was that the modem was only 14.4 - good enough for email and ftp but forget the web (mac 68k web browsers sucked anyway) and even on ethernet the web browsers weren't the best.

Still it taught me soem valuable lessons about what is needed for productive retro and travel computing, and it doesn't just mean a laptop.

Then it sat in its case for three and a half years. I'd moved on and didn't have the same requirements for travel computing. So last week it was powered up (and it did first time) had all the documents wiped from it, and powered down for the last time.

Pity. I almost felt sad. It had been a good machine that served its purpose well.

Science, blogs and web 2.0

Couple of interesting articles picked up by way of the New Scientist technology blog, one showing that Instant Messaging is increasingly important for brainstorming between researchers who are online, and one from Nature claiming to show that scientists are on the whole not that interested in blogging, for a number of reasons, including that blogs don't count for citation purposes and the lurking fear that someone might get a march on your ideas as you are developing and discussing them, in the main as you can't control whom you communicate with.

This would be a concern for our development of a collaboration space based on Sakai, but it's really only designed to get rid of the tyrrany of timezones and have people work on joint documents within a closed space, so it becomes an internal discussion forum for a closed research group, ie a way of exchanging and editing drafts of a paper rather releasing works in progress to the world

Khipu (or quipu)

Writing systems fascinate me, ever since I was a kid and used to make up pretend alphabets. It was this fascination that has led me to (a) learn Russian, and (b) spend time buggering around with installing non-latin fonts for people in the days when it didn't just happen automagically.

It's also got a lot to do with my interest in lunguages and user interface design.

I've known about the Inca coding system for some time but really didn't know much about it and though that it was just a sophisticated tally system. Then I happened across a posting in Wired about a new model that suggests that the system was really ore complex than that and actually functioned as some sort of symbol based writing system. Doubly intriguing as ost other writing systems have followed the marks on a surface model, be they scratched on ostraka, written on the shinbones or goats or even the good old black marks on white paper.

Couple of other references:

Article (originally from NY Times)
Khipu research site

Blog api's

I've been playing with flickr and am quite taken at the way you can post photos direct from flickr into your blog, Clever use of an api.

Over at my other blog I've been musing about multiuser blog software and the joys of exporting and importing posts from blog providers - something I'd like to do, as well as the professional need to come up with a multi user blog solution that has ldap integration and doesn't suck in some disgusting way and is free

odd ...

A long time ago, just before I moved to Australia my resume was picked up by what was then webct, who phoned me up to talk (in very vague and hypothetical terms) about my perhaps working for them.

Well nothing came of it, I moved to Oz, did things and then today, I get an email from blackboard, who now own webct, asking me if I was still vaguely interested.

What's odd is that they sent it to the jnd[at]apex[dot]net[dot]au account that i've hardly ever used and is set up to forward to my wife's mailbox. Even more bizarre is that the apex account dies tomorrow, since we've given them the flick ...

I thought about posting this on my other blog which is linked to from my resume website but thought better of it - you never know it might be (another) change of direction

istanbul golden horn sunset

istanbul golden horn sunset
Originally uploaded by moncur_d.

I took this in August 1998. If you've looked at my other blog you'll know that I'd lost the picture.

Fortunately I've now found it, along with a few others from the Turkey trip.

surf at hobart beach

surf at hobart beach
Originally uploaded by moncur_d.

Well,

last weekend we went down to Tathra, walked on beaches, ate freshly caught fish and did some human things - great to be away for a weekend