Category: Computers and Internet

Richard Clayton, over at the Light Blue Touchpaper blog, has discovered that the European Human Rights Centre is not what it seems… Another example of "on the Internet, no-one knows you’re a dog".

Yes, well, as a rule I don’t like this sort of thing. But I have to confess that the cry of "Oh my god, they killed Clippy" in episode 6 did raise a smile… It couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow…

Mike Torres, over at Torres Talking, points out how useful the Sharing Folders feature in Windows Live Messenger can be for sharing high-resolution photos with your online contacts. Hmm, looks useful indeed. I must try it out and swap some photos with my brother.

The BBC plans to use the Internet to distribute much of its current and archive material.  At the moment, if you live in the UK, it is possible to watch clips, and sometimes complete episodes of current TV shows via the Internet. Those of us who are outside the UK are usually prevented from accessing the material by Internet filtering.

 

However, apparently Azureus, the makers of a BitTorrent software client, and the Beeb have inked an agreement that may open the way to use BitTorrent for worldwide distribution of BBC material. Worth keeping an eye on, I think. 

Thus far, I’ve successfully avoided the siren song of the Apple iPod and not bought one. And I fully intend to keep it that way. Now, of course, Microsoft has arrived in the same market space with its Zune device. I was asked by a friend recently, knowing of my love/hate relationship with all things Microsoft, whether I would be buying myself a Zune. My instant gut reaction was to classify it in the "hate" camp. Now I’m pleased to see that I will be able to quote evidence to back up my initial intuition, courtesy of Andy Ihnatko’s review of the Zune in the Chicago Sun-Times.

CAPTCHAs are those little checks that you see on web pages where you are asked to recognise the word shown in a graphic image and type it in.

 

Mindhacks has a fascinating blog entry about them – including how spammers are using human weakness for sex into breaking the protection of CAPTCHAs.

 

Equally fascinating is the update to the entry pointing to a Google video of Luis von Ahn talking about them. But I note the irony that the human responsible for captioning the talk made a transcription error over von Ahn’s name…

Earlier this month, I mentioned the fact that an early preview of Microsoft’s Photosynth had been released. Bill Crow, over at his Windows Media Photo Blog gives us a peek behind the curtain at the technology that powers Photosynth. Interesting stuff to a nerd like me.

That’s Microsoft Windows. Version 1.0 was released on 20th November 1985. Somewhat depressing to realise just how long it’s been around. More Windows trivia to celebrate the anniversary here.

The eStarling is clearly a device for someone with more money than sense. $250 for a tiny photoframe? I think not. Wake me up when it’s a tenth of the price, and then I’ll think about it.

A rather alarming article in today’s Guardian. The UK government has started issuing what it calls "ultra-secure" passports containing biometric information on an RFID chip. The government is confident that the information is sufficiently protected. Unfortunately, it has taken a journalist and a computer security expert just minutes to break it. Well, what a surprise. The naivety of governments when it comes to computer systems and technology knows no bounds.

I leave my computer running 24 hours a day. My excuse for this non-green waste of resources is that it’s running the BBC’s Climate Change Experiment. One night last week, the computer shut itself down. Checking the event log, I found that the graphics card had overheated. The inside of the PC seemed to be dustfree, but I cleaned everything anyway. I also kept an eye on the temperature of the graphics card. Sure enough, it did seem to be wildly fluctuating – mostly about 80º C, but occasionally shooting up to the mid-nineties. After several more forced shutdowns, I identified the cause of the problem – the fan on the graphics card wasn’t running efficiently – its bearing was shot.

 

So off to the local computer shop to see what could be done. The best shop locally is Hecosys, in Silvolde. A veritable Aladdin’s cave for computers. They recommended simply replacing the fan with a third-party cooling product, rather than replacing the entire card. So that’s what I did, at a tenth of the price of a new graphics card. I bought a Zalman fan (a VF700-Cu) from them, and now the card is running at 50º C – and I can’t hear the fan at all. I’m a happy bunny again.

Via idiolect.org.uk, I came across this Guardian article by Khoi Vinh, who argues that a way of overcoming writer’s block is to use a manual typewriter instead of a word processor. There may be something in the idea. And if you haven’t got that manual typewriter any more, then you could try the software equivalent: Writeroom for the Mac, or Darkroom for Windows.

Stephen Walli has an interesting post up on his blog (Once More unto the Breach) about his experiences on a recent trip to Beijing to attend a conference on Open Standards. I’ve known Stephe for years – we used to meet up at standards conferences in the last century. Stephe, have you got rid of your ponytail? Good decision – I never really cared for it. Oh, and look, there’s Carl Cargill too! Heavens, another face from the past. Glad to see that you are both clearly enjoying life.

Last month, I mentioned new telepresence products from Cisco and Microsoft. Here’s some more information on the Microsoft product, Office Roundtable.

 

First up is an interview with Ross Cutler of Microsoft Research talking about some of the innovations that have been done with the video camera device. Via that link, you can also download the 360 degree panoramic video of the interview, and see it as an Office Roundtable device would present it. Interesting stuff.

 

And by way of light relief, here’s a take on how the product might be used.

Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World-Wide Web, is worried about the fact that the web will become a place where "untruths start to spread more than truths".

 

Hello? This is human nature that we are talking about. Sturgeon’s Revelation is equally valid for the Web as for any other area of human endeavour. And for blogging, even more so…

 

Update: Tim Berners-Lee reminds us all that journalists who quote out of context are not exactly rare either…

One of the apparent limitations of Windows Live Spaces is the difficulty of tracking down topics that I’ve written about in my blog. You know the sort of thing: I remember writing about the BBC’s series of The Apprentice, but I can’t for the life of me remember when… Using Google or Windows Live Search returns millions of results, so how to narrow it down?

 

Well, of course, it turns out that it’s relatively straightforward, if you know how.

 

Google does have a blog search, and using the Advanced settings, it’s possible to narrow down the search to just my blog entries. That screen will build the search query for you using Google’s query syntax. So, the Advanced settings screen builds the query: "apprentice" blogurl:gcoupe.spaces.live.com.

 

Windows Live Search has a similar capability, in fact their Advanced settings screen has more options to tune the search than Google does. Once again, using the Advanced Settings screen will build the query:  apprentice site:gcoupe.spaces.live.com. You’ll notice that Microsoft’s query syntax is not the same as Google. Standards, doncha just love them? Rob has more about the Microsoft query syntax over at The Space Craft.

 

One interesting thing about searching for the word "apprentice" in my blog: Windows Live Search finds all three instances; Google only finds two…

Tim Adams has an interesting article in today’s Observer about Second Life – the online virtual world where a million people have gone to escape from their real lives – and ended up doing exactly the same things as people do in the real world. Wetware or software – it’s all the same, it seems to me. The attraction of Second Life continues to baffle me. 

By coincidence, two major players have announced telepresence products this week. Microsoft announced their RoundTable products (due next year) and Cisco has announced their TelePresence range.

 

The Cisco products are interesting in a number of ways. They’ve taken the approach of making the experience of holding a virtual meeting as realistic as possible, using big HD screens and compression technology to make latency as low as possible (a minimum of 150 msec end-to-end). Their top end product (the TelePresence 3000) gives a strong illusion that twelve people are sitting around a single table – but in fact half of the table and six participants are in one location and six are in another location, with the other half of the table. The approach doesn’t come cheap – each end costs $300,000.

 

Microsoft, on the other hand are tackling the low end of the telepresence market, with products predicted to come in at around the $3,000 mark for setting up one end of a teleconference.

 

I think there’s room for both, particularly if they can interoperate, so that, for example, the CEO, seated in her Telepresence meeting room, can address employees gathered in meeting rooms, or seated at their own PCs.

 

In my time in Shell, I had experience of both ends of teleconferencing, with various degrees of success. Even with the high-end systems, though, the experience was far from realistic and too often not trouble-free. Cisco do seem to have pushed the envelope, and it will be interesting to see how well they do in the market against the established players. Cisco themselves are rolling out 110 TelePresence rooms inside their own company.

 

To get an impression of what the Cisco product is like, download or watch Robert Scoble’s video Podcast. It has Guido Jouret, Cisco’s CTO explaining to a group of people what the technology is behind the illusion. For techno-nerds, like me, this was a very interesting video, with Jouret giving a lucid explanation of how the products came about and what the plans are. Fast forward a few years, and this technology will have come down in price to probably a tenth of the cost, and be much more widely available to small companies, and not just the Fortune 100.

Miguel Carrasco has put together his list of the 10 biggest computer flops of all time. Being the pendant that I am, I take issue with his list in a couple of respects. First, that "of all time" tag always irritates me. What he means, of course, is "time up until now". But, as I say, I’m in pedant mode.

 

More seriously however, I would question his attribution of the "greatest flop" label against some of his list. Yes, the Xerox Alto and the NeXT did not become ubiquitous. But I would argue that they were seminal. They represented ideas and ideals that subsequent designers sought to emulate, and have led directly to today’s Macintosh and Windows operating systems. And CP/M was hardly "one of the greatest flops". It was remarkably successful for its time. It fell, not through a fault of its own, but because a meeting between IBM and its owner did not take place.

 

Still, I would agree with his inclusion of the embarrassing IBM PC/Jr and the Apple Newton in his list. Both should have been strangled at birth. And on the software side, Microsoft’s BOB, Windows ME and IBM’s OS/2 probably deserve to be there. Although, to be fair, OS/2 soldiered on in ATMs for years before falling by the wayside.