Google Buzz, Google's latest addition to gmail that harvests and redistributes content - basically to give gmail a facebook-lite type of experience has the rather annoying feature that it creates a message in your sent mail folder for every item harvested - so send twenty tweets - get twenty messages.
Now, if you use your sent mail folder to check what you said in a previous email (always a good idea if a followup email is needed) it becomes difficult to find said item by eyeballing the message list. (yes I know you could search, but it seems overkill for a message you sent yesterday).
The solution is of course simple - Buzz (a) creates the message as coming from me and (b) prefixes the subject of the item it creates in the sent folder with "Buzz:" making it easy to write a filter to delete the items. This isn't quite perfect, as gmail doesn't really believe in folders meaning that the filter could potentially delete a message if I was to send myself one with a subject line starting "Buzz:" but it's probably good enough for most cases.
(BTW, this reminds me of a problem with early versions of Eudora for the Mac which used to automatically encode binary files with binhex and prefix the encoded file with 'this file is encoded with binhex 4.0'. Unfortunately Eudora would look for this phrase and then try and decode all following text, meaning that support desk messages asking people to check for the string in messages which refused for some reason to decode could never be read as they failed to decode ... )
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
Friday, 12 February 2010
did an australian meteorite cause the anglo saxon migrations
One from the department of wacky but intriguing ideas:
I recently tweeted a couple of links (Mail Online, National Geographic) on whether a large meteorite hit the Gulf of Carpentaria around AD530, and the resulting debris caused global cooling in the northern hemisphere with crop failures, possibly increasing the pressure on the peoples who became the Anglo Saxons to migrate to England from Frisia and also that it was easier for them to establish and expand their poplulations as the British successor states ability to resist encroachment was reduced as the result of famine.
As I say, intriguing. If as has been suggested, the plague of Justinian had had a greater impact of the British population because of greater exposure through continental trading links, it could just be so - sick and starving versus just plain starving.
What I also like is the rather cool way it ties Duane Hamacher's apparently unconnected research into the recording of astronomical events in Aboriginal dreamtime stories, and shows that all knowledge is useful ...
I recently tweeted a couple of links (Mail Online, National Geographic) on whether a large meteorite hit the Gulf of Carpentaria around AD530, and the resulting debris caused global cooling in the northern hemisphere with crop failures, possibly increasing the pressure on the peoples who became the Anglo Saxons to migrate to England from Frisia and also that it was easier for them to establish and expand their poplulations as the British successor states ability to resist encroachment was reduced as the result of famine.
As I say, intriguing. If as has been suggested, the plague of Justinian had had a greater impact of the British population because of greater exposure through continental trading links, it could just be so - sick and starving versus just plain starving.
What I also like is the rather cool way it ties Duane Hamacher's apparently unconnected research into the recording of astronomical events in Aboriginal dreamtime stories, and shows that all knowledge is useful ...
Tuesday, 9 February 2010
Killing Paleography
The proposal to shut down paleography at KCL has created a bit of a stoush, especially when seen in the context of all the other cuts to universities in the UK. While universities have always closed courses and departments because they're not cost effective - for example the closure of chemistry at a number of prominent universities - it always does seem that it's the Arts and Humanities that unfairly take the majority of the cuts - something that always put me in mind of Pinochet and his generals, fired up on monetarist theory and economic realism, ordering the universities in post-coup Chile to purge themselves of 'useless' subjects.
Universities are businesses. However universities are about teaching people to think, and challenge people, to stretch the best and brightest, and to do that you need to pique people's interest. Universities are not about vocational education - though there is a temptation to see them as factories for producing doctors, lawyers or accountants - but about getting people to the point where they can master complex material, draw conclusions and argue from it - which is an incredibly valuable skill for the public service, running a bank, or planning a project.
Just because there seems to be an endless supply of fusionless drippy English graduates is no more a reason for closing English faculties than the plethora of boring stay-press trousered accountants is for closing business schools, And this leads me on to the other arguement - things like paleography contribute immensely to our intellectual capital - like say character recognition and automatic handwriting recognition - as well as contributing in other ways. For example, one might think that the study of Tudor court history was for the chop, but no one can doubt that David Starkey is both and entertaining and erudite exponent of it, and that scholars of that calibre are an ornament to our society, even if some (most ?) of them lack David Starkey's pizzaz and presentation.
My other point is that when people ask what is the use of a particular subject, the real answer is that one never knows. One might guess but anything more than five years out is wild speculation.
Look for example at the closing of Russian departments in the 1990's. Well, we'd won the cold war, Russia was no longer a political or military threat, so stuff it. Looks rather different now when Russia is an economic power possessed of vast gas and oil supplies, minerals and the rest, and soon to be the only nation with a demonstrated capability to send crews for the ISS into space.
On indeed, look at the Honorable Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia, who has a degree in Chinese literature. He's roughly the same age as me, which means when he was struggling through the Chinese classics, China was emerging from the throes of the cultural revolution and notable only for producing very robust bicycles. His choice of study must have looked incredibly geeky at the time. Now it looks shrewd, especially given his undoubted language skills and the importance of China as an export market for Australian minerals - of which by the way, at least one major nickel mine is part owned by a Russian consortium ...
Universities are businesses. However universities are about teaching people to think, and challenge people, to stretch the best and brightest, and to do that you need to pique people's interest. Universities are not about vocational education - though there is a temptation to see them as factories for producing doctors, lawyers or accountants - but about getting people to the point where they can master complex material, draw conclusions and argue from it - which is an incredibly valuable skill for the public service, running a bank, or planning a project.
Just because there seems to be an endless supply of fusionless drippy English graduates is no more a reason for closing English faculties than the plethora of boring stay-press trousered accountants is for closing business schools, And this leads me on to the other arguement - things like paleography contribute immensely to our intellectual capital - like say character recognition and automatic handwriting recognition - as well as contributing in other ways. For example, one might think that the study of Tudor court history was for the chop, but no one can doubt that David Starkey is both and entertaining and erudite exponent of it, and that scholars of that calibre are an ornament to our society, even if some (most ?) of them lack David Starkey's pizzaz and presentation.
My other point is that when people ask what is the use of a particular subject, the real answer is that one never knows. One might guess but anything more than five years out is wild speculation.
Look for example at the closing of Russian departments in the 1990's. Well, we'd won the cold war, Russia was no longer a political or military threat, so stuff it. Looks rather different now when Russia is an economic power possessed of vast gas and oil supplies, minerals and the rest, and soon to be the only nation with a demonstrated capability to send crews for the ISS into space.
On indeed, look at the Honorable Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia, who has a degree in Chinese literature. He's roughly the same age as me, which means when he was struggling through the Chinese classics, China was emerging from the throes of the cultural revolution and notable only for producing very robust bicycles. His choice of study must have looked incredibly geeky at the time. Now it looks shrewd, especially given his undoubted language skills and the importance of China as an export market for Australian minerals - of which by the way, at least one major nickel mine is part owned by a Russian consortium ...
Sunday, 7 February 2010
The $83 machine is no more ...
The $83 home made machine is no more.
Yesterday it refused to boot, or power off. Opened it up, reseated memory, disk cables, which improved it a little more if some piteous buzzing and beeping can be called an improvement. I have this distinct feeling it's a motherboard fault - yes I could do some more diagnostics, unplugging disks etc, but given it's general failure to do anything it looks fairly terminal.
At the same time the ppc imac in the study is clearly coming to the end of its useful life - not because it's unreliable or slow, but because as I've moved to using more and more features of the Google ecology I find that the browser version supported by the operating system simply doesn't work that well with Gmail or Google docs. So it's headed to the garage as an extra machine for random extra browsing.
So what to do? Basically go and buy a new cheap laptop as a desktop replacement, in my case a Dell Inspiron 15. 64-bit windows 7 and no option for alternative operating systems so I'm going to be re-assimilated by the evil empire, but on the other hand if you work with computers I guess I should know something about windows 7, and with the option of installing virtual box I can run a linux operating system if I want. Add Firefox, Open Office, AbiWord - for its conversion tools, Zotero, and a coupld of bits and pieces and I should be right, though a decent editor might be a bit more of a problem.
I also reckon I can probably install the latest Ubuntu if Windows 7 turns out to be unbearable.
And there's a message here (isn't there always) - if you recycle old machines you've got to be willing to (a) accept that there's a higher risk of component failure and (b) feature creep killing your machines. However it's still a good strategy - I got two productive years out of these machines, and it cost me $20 - given I've still got the second user Sun monitor I paid $63 for. Makes it worth hanging on to the dead machine in case I happen across another machine to cannibalize and turn into a linux only box - which of course is the rub and why shipping old machines to the third world to be re-used is bad - they need higher support costs and more repairmen to keep them going, even though linux and FOSS saves a bundle on licensing costs.
Likewise as a reasonable number of universities in East Africa and elsewhere make use of the Google ecology to keep their ICT delivery costs down, it means that any old machines donated have to support recent environments, or else they are just valueless boat anchors ...
Yesterday it refused to boot, or power off. Opened it up, reseated memory, disk cables, which improved it a little more if some piteous buzzing and beeping can be called an improvement. I have this distinct feeling it's a motherboard fault - yes I could do some more diagnostics, unplugging disks etc, but given it's general failure to do anything it looks fairly terminal.
At the same time the ppc imac in the study is clearly coming to the end of its useful life - not because it's unreliable or slow, but because as I've moved to using more and more features of the Google ecology I find that the browser version supported by the operating system simply doesn't work that well with Gmail or Google docs. So it's headed to the garage as an extra machine for random extra browsing.
So what to do? Basically go and buy a new cheap laptop as a desktop replacement, in my case a Dell Inspiron 15. 64-bit windows 7 and no option for alternative operating systems so I'm going to be re-assimilated by the evil empire, but on the other hand if you work with computers I guess I should know something about windows 7, and with the option of installing virtual box I can run a linux operating system if I want. Add Firefox, Open Office, AbiWord - for its conversion tools, Zotero, and a coupld of bits and pieces and I should be right, though a decent editor might be a bit more of a problem.
I also reckon I can probably install the latest Ubuntu if Windows 7 turns out to be unbearable.
And there's a message here (isn't there always) - if you recycle old machines you've got to be willing to (a) accept that there's a higher risk of component failure and (b) feature creep killing your machines. However it's still a good strategy - I got two productive years out of these machines, and it cost me $20 - given I've still got the second user Sun monitor I paid $63 for. Makes it worth hanging on to the dead machine in case I happen across another machine to cannibalize and turn into a linux only box - which of course is the rub and why shipping old machines to the third world to be re-used is bad - they need higher support costs and more repairmen to keep them going, even though linux and FOSS saves a bundle on licensing costs.
Likewise as a reasonable number of universities in East Africa and elsewhere make use of the Google ecology to keep their ICT delivery costs down, it means that any old machines donated have to support recent environments, or else they are just valueless boat anchors ...
Friday, 5 February 2010
Archival file systems
Most file systems are fairly straight forward - objects are written to them, objects are read from them, objects are rewritten to them, objects are deleted from them. In other words files are created, modified and deleted, and as more files are created than are ever deleted the number of files grows and eventually the filesystem fills up.
In such a context backup is equally straight forward - you periodically copy the files to another lower cost medium, typically tape, and that way you build up a set of copies allowing you to roll back files to a certain point and to guard against corruption by having multiple copies. There is an implication here that the files that are most likely to become corrupt are those that stay on disk longest.
Such filesystems are however very much the middle case. There are extreme examples at both ends. One, as typically exemplified by student filestores, is the case where the system is never quiet and has a high state of churn with lots of files being created, changed and destroyed. The other is the archival filestore, as found in a digital repository, where ideally one never deletes any object from the filestore.
In both of these scenarios what one needs to do is to write multiple copies of the objects, record their checksums and the date the file was last touched (changed), and then periodically rescan the filestore for unexpected anomalous changes ie where one copy is different from all the others and if it is replace it with a known good copy. It's also true to say that as these filestores are not required to handle a lot of fast transactions the write and read performance can be variable with in limits.
Exactly because we are not envisaging their use for high demand transaction processing systems where fast predictable performance is required we can happily use commodity technolgies for the disk systems and ethernet based solutions for the network interfaces, making the solutions potentially cheap to deploy.
Essentially, in both cases we are looking at a clustered self healing network attached filestore built out of commodity technology. Add some geographical separation and we have resilence and the ability to cope with unexpected events such power loss.
The nice thing is that the system is self maintaining once deployed, and also self contained as regards the smarts involved. For our applications it only needs to present a well known interface, such as an ext3 filesystem.
If we wish to run this as a high demand filesystem and support heterogeneous clients we simply need to front end the filestore with simple boxes to re-export the appropriate parts of the filestore.
In the case of archival filestores all access should be mediated by the repository application, but of course there is nothing to stop you reusing the object between multiple applications, so the pdf of a research paper can appear in both an open access repository, a learning objects repository, or indeed a staff directory to generate a dynamic publications list.
However, the key takeaway is that it is fault tolerant. And if it's fault tolerant the individual components don't have to be super reliable - they just need to be reliable enough to ensure that you have enough good copies of the files to cope with component failure or local filesystem corruption. In essance it becomes a local storage cloud...
In such a context backup is equally straight forward - you periodically copy the files to another lower cost medium, typically tape, and that way you build up a set of copies allowing you to roll back files to a certain point and to guard against corruption by having multiple copies. There is an implication here that the files that are most likely to become corrupt are those that stay on disk longest.
Such filesystems are however very much the middle case. There are extreme examples at both ends. One, as typically exemplified by student filestores, is the case where the system is never quiet and has a high state of churn with lots of files being created, changed and destroyed. The other is the archival filestore, as found in a digital repository, where ideally one never deletes any object from the filestore.
In both of these scenarios what one needs to do is to write multiple copies of the objects, record their checksums and the date the file was last touched (changed), and then periodically rescan the filestore for unexpected anomalous changes ie where one copy is different from all the others and if it is replace it with a known good copy. It's also true to say that as these filestores are not required to handle a lot of fast transactions the write and read performance can be variable with in limits.
Exactly because we are not envisaging their use for high demand transaction processing systems where fast predictable performance is required we can happily use commodity technolgies for the disk systems and ethernet based solutions for the network interfaces, making the solutions potentially cheap to deploy.
Essentially, in both cases we are looking at a clustered self healing network attached filestore built out of commodity technology. Add some geographical separation and we have resilence and the ability to cope with unexpected events such power loss.
The nice thing is that the system is self maintaining once deployed, and also self contained as regards the smarts involved. For our applications it only needs to present a well known interface, such as an ext3 filesystem.
If we wish to run this as a high demand filesystem and support heterogeneous clients we simply need to front end the filestore with simple boxes to re-export the appropriate parts of the filestore.
In the case of archival filestores all access should be mediated by the repository application, but of course there is nothing to stop you reusing the object between multiple applications, so the pdf of a research paper can appear in both an open access repository, a learning objects repository, or indeed a staff directory to generate a dynamic publications list.
However, the key takeaway is that it is fault tolerant. And if it's fault tolerant the individual components don't have to be super reliable - they just need to be reliable enough to ensure that you have enough good copies of the files to cope with component failure or local filesystem corruption. In essance it becomes a local storage cloud...
Tuesday, 2 February 2010
iPads and memes
This post is not really about the iPad it's about memes and production costs.
The concept of the slate computer has entered popular consciousness, in no small part due to Apple's razzamatazz. And undoubtedly it will be a success. The interesting thing is that already there are two possible alternatives - the JooJoo (née Crunchpad and possibly in a death spiral) and a hacked up no name Chinese equivalent with poor battery life.
Of the two, the Chinese machine is the more interesting - it's a simple low cost hardware hack - and something similar combined with ChromeOs or Splashtop would give a similar web viewing content consumption experience. And as Google keep on telling us these days the browser is the user interface - something which is a danger for Apple, as it becomes difficult to claim to be unique and special when other people can offer an equivalent experience. And for a web based experience its browser stability, browser performance, and underlying operating system stability - something the firefox/linux combo certainly delivers.
Apple's user interface experience, and team of dedicated, perfectionist designers, probably means that the iPad is very good at what it does. But with Apple rumoured to be making around $200 profit on the hardware in each iPad, and given that production costs for each equivalent device must be roughly the same there's obviously room for someone to undercut Apple with something pretty similar - after all the Newton lost out to the Palm Pilot, which while cheaper, was by no means an inferior device.
The concept of the slate computer has entered popular consciousness, in no small part due to Apple's razzamatazz. And undoubtedly it will be a success. The interesting thing is that already there are two possible alternatives - the JooJoo (née Crunchpad and possibly in a death spiral) and a hacked up no name Chinese equivalent with poor battery life.
Of the two, the Chinese machine is the more interesting - it's a simple low cost hardware hack - and something similar combined with ChromeOs or Splashtop would give a similar web viewing content consumption experience. And as Google keep on telling us these days the browser is the user interface - something which is a danger for Apple, as it becomes difficult to claim to be unique and special when other people can offer an equivalent experience. And for a web based experience its browser stability, browser performance, and underlying operating system stability - something the firefox/linux combo certainly delivers.
Apple's user interface experience, and team of dedicated, perfectionist designers, probably means that the iPad is very good at what it does. But with Apple rumoured to be making around $200 profit on the hardware in each iPad, and given that production costs for each equivalent device must be roughly the same there's obviously room for someone to undercut Apple with something pretty similar - after all the Newton lost out to the Palm Pilot, which while cheaper, was by no means an inferior device.
Monday, 1 February 2010
the crt is dead ...
interesting snippet from yesterday's Canberra Times - apparently with the onset of digital television - and the extra channels that's brought, more and more people are dumping their old, but perfectly good, analog glass crt tv's rather than simply going out and buying a set top box. Instead they're going out and buying new plasma and lcd tv's. (And doubtless hard disk recorders as well - the vcr is also a dead technology).
Net result - the recyclers are swamped with perfectly good, if old, tv's.
Basically, the extra digital channels have brought about an 'ipod moment' for digital tv sets. Question is will we see such an ipod moment for e-readers or will it be a slow incremental drift to electronic technologies?
Net result - the recyclers are swamped with perfectly good, if old, tv's.
Basically, the extra digital channels have brought about an 'ipod moment' for digital tv sets. Question is will we see such an ipod moment for e-readers or will it be a slow incremental drift to electronic technologies?
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