Category: Computers and Internet

Google Earth is out of beta status as of yesterday. What’s more, there is now a version for the Macintosh. So those of you who are Mac users can download this amazing free program and find out what you’ve been missing out on. Frank Taylor, over at the Google Earth Blog has some navigational tips for new users.

I see that the Guardian carried an article earlier this week on the Microsoft Research project: MyLifeBits. Gordon Bell, a computer pioneer, is the guinea pig who is having his every waking moment recorded for Posterity – although whether Posterity will be pleased is probably a moot point.

 

The article carries a sentence that seems to me to put its finger on the weak point of the project:

"Picking one’s way" through reams of information hardly seems to me to be the most efficient manner of information retrieval. What I think the MyLifeBits project is so far is a "write-only" data vault. Until ways can be found to retrieve information quickly from all that data, then I would classify this as an interesting, but so far a sterile, piece of research.

There’s apparently a vulnerability in the graphics rendering engine of Windows that’s being exploited in a new series of attacks. No fix as yet, but a security warning has been published by Microsoft. Be careful what websites you visit.

This concept Tablet PC by Lenovo has won an award. I hope that the award spurs Lenovo on to actually manufacture and sell it. I’m already lusting after it.

I mentioned one virtual world – WoW – a couple of days ago. Now comes news that another virtual world – Asheron’s Call – is about to die. The game’s owners will pull the plugs on its servers at the end of the month. Wired has a bittersweet article about the demise of the world.

 

Wired has another article on the theme of "all things must pass" – the Bay Area NeXT Group is closing its doors. The NeXT computer was a machine that was ahead of its time – too far ahead as it turned out. It was a computer that I lusted over, but could never hope to have. Still, the ghost of NeXT lives on – in the Mac OS X operating system.

Nope, not Homer’s epic poem, but an electronic book reader due to be released in 2006. Could be interesting to watch out for.

I’ve mentioned Bill Hill before. He’s a typographer who works for Microsoft, and is always fascinating to listen to. He’s back again on Channel 9 with other members of his team talking about the new fonts that are being designed for Vista – the next version of Windows.

 

Bill makes the point that for 500 years, font design has been dictated by the practicalities of the printing press. Now we are at the stage where people will increasingly read text from a screen, rather than the printed page. That change in medium will influence the design of fonts. Interesting stuff.

Well, one answer comes from this catchy little number… I’m afraid it’s got an earworm that will ensure that you probably find yourself humming the tune despite yourself. (hat tip to Gizmodo UK)

 

The World of Warcraft is an amazing Internet-based phenomenon in its own right. There are supposedly 4.5 million players in this virtual world. Personally, I have enough difficulty anchoring myself in my own reality without wanting to spend hours/days/weeks pretending to be in another. The attraction seems to have passed me by. Mind you, some people apparently insist on dragging more of their world with them into WoW, and this has been a step too far for some.

If you put any faith in these sorts of things, then it’s official: The meaning of the Mona Lisa’s smile has been defined. Personally, I liked the theory (was it expounded by Sister Wendy Beckett?) that she’s smiling because she knows Leonardo’s a poof.

There’s a very good history of the personal computer written by Jeremy Reimer over at Ars Technica. Worth checking out if you are interested in PCs. It strikes me that many of today’s geek youngsters don’t know the history. Those of us who lived through it tend to get all nostalgic, like me.

Interesting to read that Microsoft has announced that it will be submitting the XML formats of Office to the standardisation body of Ecma International together with other companies.

 

Even more interesting to read that the companies include BP and Statoil. I am a bit disappointed that Shell was not in the list.

That stands for One Laptop Per Child – a project aimed at providing a cheap and robust laptop to children in developing countries. It’s aimed at bridging the so-called Digital Divide.

 

It’s certainly an ambitious project, and has caught the attention of both the UN and the geeks. And while I’m certainly not decrying the value of education alongside solving other problems like disease and hunger, I’m not convinced that this device will turn out to be the best solution. The phrase "cheap and robust" sounds too much like an oxymoron when applied to computers. Even when it’s "expensive and robust" it’s often the same – witness Apple’s problems with its iPOD Nano – they couldn’t make that robust, and it’s not even a proper computer, just a playback toy.

 

Lee Felsenstein dissects the OLPC in greater depth, and the prognosis is not good.

Mike Torres, over at his Torres Talking blog gushes about Orb – a new application that enables media streaming from your home PC to any web-based device – a remote PC, a mobile phone, a PDA, etc.

 

I have to admit, it does sound intriguing, and it’s free (what on earth is the business model of Orb?). I suppose one area of concern is the security issue – what are the points of weakness about the mechanisms used? I think I’ll let others kick the tyres for a little longer on this.

 

The other issue would be about using it to stream to mobile phones. Mike claims that it turns his mobile phone into an iPod on steroids. Well, yes, I would have access to a vast vault of media sitting at home – far more than on an iPod slung around my neck. But, ahem, what are the costs of streaming all that to the mobile phone? I speak as someone who refuses to get a monthly subscription, preferring to pay as I go. So far it’s cost me all of 20 euros for 18 months usage. The phone companies clearly aren’t going to get rich through people like me. They need people like Mike.

Do you suffer from cold hands? Find it difficult to blog on a cold day? Here’s just the thing for you.

I see that Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn are being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom today – the highest civilian honour in the US. It’s being awarded for their work on the TCP/IP protocols – the core networking protocols of the Internet.

 

Interestingly, the award comes on the day when the US Congress is debating a bill that could fundamentally alter the way in which the Internet is run, giving rise to concerns that broadband operators will govern the nature of activity on the Internet. Cerf shares those concerns, so he has written to Congress about them. Here’s hoping that Congress pays him some attention.

Kai Yung has built a website that integrates photos held in Flickr with Google Maps. It shows the power of what can be done using the APIs of the two services.

 

One thing I find somewhat amusing is that on this site, the navigation of the mouse scrollwheel is consistent with Yahoo and Microsoft maps. Yet one more datapoint to show that the scrollwheel navigation on Google Earth is out of step with the rest of the world…

Here’s a turnup for the books, as it were. Amazon has just announced its Mechanical Turk – what it defines as artificial artificial intelligence. It’s a brilliant idea – but I’ll bet that its network of humans inside the mechanical Turk are outsourced to low cost countries such as India faster than you can say Wolfgang von Kempelen.

I mentioned the user community that has grown up around the Google Earth application earlier today. As an example of how Google Earth is being used, Frank Taylor, over at the Google Earth Blog, writes about how the spread of avian flu around the globe is being tracked by a member of the Google Earth Community. Here’s a screenshot showing a sample of the data (click to go to the original on Flickr, where you can choose higher resolution versions of the shot for greater clarity).

 

 

 

Update: Frank Taylor, over at the Google Earth Blog reports that Declan Butler, a senior reporter at Nature Magazine, has published a new version of the avian flu outbreak map. He advises this new map be used for accuracy.

 

A new version of Yahoo Maps was launched yesterday. It uses Flash technology, instead of Ajax (which is used by its rivals, Google Maps and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth.

 

It’s a good thing it’s a beta, because it crashed on me within seconds when I tried to use my mouse’s scroll-wheel to zoom.

 

By the way, one thing that I find supremely irritating is that Google’s use of the scroll wheel to zoom is the exact opposite of the way in which Microsoft and Yahoo use it. Google wins the Donald A. Norman award for piss-poor user interface consistency in my view. They don’t even give you the option to reverse it. 

 

Google Maps (despite the user interface cock-up) works the best for me. Microsoft’s offering returns blank map tiles too often for my liking. And all of them are either sketchy or non-existent when it comes to showing maps outside of North America.

 

But my favourite map application is still Google Earth. The combination of the PC application fed by data from Google’s map servers is still a far richer user experience than any browser-based map application that I’ve yet seen. There’s a really vibrant user community adding data to the maps. I’ve recently been visiting all of the locations mentioned by Shakespeare in his plays. All added by enthusiastic users.

Thin-client computers were all the rage a few years ago, with some vendors claiming huge savings over the costs of infrastructures built with traditional PCs. Thankfully, the hype has been exposed for what it was, and thin-client technologies have settled in alongside PCs as a useful and sensible alternative in particular situations.

 

Now Chip PC have announced the Jack-PC – a thin client so thin that it’s actually installed inside the wall socket. This is not thin – this is anorexic.