The Blog of Harald

In an article for the upcoming “DaVinci Institute Future of Money Summit”:http://www.futureofmoneysummit.com/index.php, Thomas Frey lists “The Top 10 Inventions in Money Technology”:http://www.futureofmoneysummit.com/top-10-inventions.php, which are:

# The Electronic Cash Register (1906)
# Electronic Money (1918)
# The First Armored Car (1920)
# Credit Bureaus (1937)
# The Automatic Teller Machine (1939)
# The Credit Card (1950)
# Barcodes (1952)
# The Smart Card (1974)
# The Spreadsheet (1978)
# RSA Encryption (1983)

I was amused to note how long it took some of these technologies to become “mainstream” after their invention. Then I got to the conclusion of the article:

bq. Probably the most revealing part of doing this research was seeing the lag time between the technology first being developed and general market acceptance. In the case of the ATM machine, the lag time was over 50 years. We often wonder about the technologies that didn’t make it onto the radar screen – the big things that simply faded from existence before they were able to get any real market feedback.

bq. Several new technologies are making significant inroads into the money world. Micropayment technologies, prepaid credit cards, mobile payment systems, and biometrics are industries on the verge of success. Public policy decisions, general economic conditions, financial backing, and the sheer determination and resolve of the startup team are the primary factors that will separate the winners from the losers as we move forward.

Scientific American: Questioning the Delphic Oracle

Prior to 1900, the behaviour of the Oracle was attributed to a vapour that produced divine posession. In about 1900, an Englishman visited excavations at the site, found no chasm or gases, and published an article debunking the claim. In the late 1990s, a couple of geologists tripped over evidence of tectonic fault lines, and started a new investigation, determining that all of the original documented Oracular behaviour could be explained by gases released by tectonic movement. Fascinating!

I particularly liked the ending:

bq. The primary lesson we took away from our Delphic oracle project is not the well-worn message that modern science can elucidate ancient curiosities. Perhaps more important is how much we have to gain if we approach problems with the same broad-minded and interdisciplinary attitude that the Greeks themselves displayed.

There were quite a few New Scientists running around in the 19th and 20th centuries dismissing established knowledge in the name of the great God Science. It’s nice to see that science changing from a hammer to a magnifying glass…

Take that, you dress code fanatics!

bq. Wearing your tie too tight could put you at increased risk of blindness, say doctors.

bq. The small study in New York measured the pressure of the fluid in the eyeball in a small group of men before and after they attached their tie.

bq. They found a significant rise – and warn that long-term pressure rises have been linked to the condition glaucoma.

(My new employer in fact has a very liberal dress code; not quite as liberal as our old complete non-policy, but close enough for comfort :-)

(Disclaimer: this is not a formal review, just my personal notes from reading the ‘net).

In a recent discussion on the misterhouse-users list, I saw three networked MP3 players mentioned:

* “Turtle Beach AudioTron”:http://www.tbeach.com/site/products/audiotron/producthome.asp ( “Review”:http://www6.tomshardware.com/network/20011220/index.html )
* “SLIMP3”:http://www.slimp3.com/
* “Barrix Exstreamer”:http://www.barix.com/exstreamer/

Some differences from reading about the products on the ‘net:

* The Audiotron has HPNA support. The Exstreamer comes in 802.11b or ethernet-only versions. The Slimp3 is ethernet only.
* The Audiotron has optical audio; the other two are analog-only. Several people have commented, however, that the Audiotron’s analog audio is lower quality.
* All three have an internal webserver, and several network-based remote control protocols. The Audiotron also has an I/R remote and front panel controls/display. The Slimp3 has an I/R remote and a local display. The Exstreamer has no display, can only be controlled over the network, but they’re working on adding I/R in a future version. On the other hand, this makes it the smallest of the three.
* The Slimp3 requires special (opensource) server software. The Audiotron reads files from windows file sharing (and samba). The Exstreamer (with the latest firmware upgrade) apparently does both. (Turtle Beach mentions the problem of having to go back to your PC to control “other products” several times in their feature list :-). The slimp3 and Exstreamer use the same server protocol, but the Slimp3 comes with a Perl version while the Exstreamer comes with a Java version. Both can be problematic with long-running servers :-)
* The Extreamer has a small internal buffer (64K); this may cause problems on busy networks.

Rough prices ($US) (You can probably find all of these products cheaper with a bit of searching):

| Audiotron ethernet + HPNA | 350 |
| Audiotron ethernet | 300 |
| Extreamer wireless | 280 |
| Slimp3 | 239 |
| Extreamer wired | 160 |

Looks like a pretty clear price/feature trade-off :-)

I have two requirements. I want a component to add to my stereo system to allow access to my MP3 collection. Either a slimp3 or an audiotron would be best for that, because of the local control; I’d have to add local control to the Exstreamer (maybe with an old Pilot?), which is too much like work :-)

I also want a source of music etc. for a whole-house audio system. In that case, the amplifier and computer would both be in the same equipment rack in the basement, so the easiest solution would be to simply connect the PC’s audio out to the amplifier’s audio in.

Still, the Exstreamer is a pretty cool device, for the price…

Jeremy Zawodny’s blog: High Availability is NOT Cheap

bq. The system will fail at some point, no matter what, even if it’s only for a few seconds. That’s reality.

Well said, bro. The context was discussions on the MySQL mailing list, but it applies to my areas of expertise (networks and security) just as easily.

Networks are fun because they can fail in surprising ways. The most obvious example is an expensive, redundant network connection that, at some geographic location, shares the same copper or fibre bundle as its primary. The backhoe takes them both at the same time! There are many less obvious failures, too. The host that starts transmitting garbage packets on a network; the network is still _up_, just unusable…

High Availability is not just expensive, it’s also _hard_…

There is a “Total Lunar Eclipse”:http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/extra/TLE2003May15.html on Thursday night (May 15-16). It might be hard to see here in Toronto; the moon is a little low in the sky at this time of year. According to the “Lunar Eclipse Calculator”:http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/LunarEclipse.html the times and and sky coordinates here are:

| Event | Time | Azimuth | Altitude |
| Moonrise | 20:20 | 115.3 | —- |
| Sunset | 20:36 | —- | —- |
| Moon enters penumbra | 21:05.3 | 123.3 | 6.1 |
| Moon enters umbra | 22:02.7 | 134.2 | 13.6 |
| Moon enters totality | 23:13.7 | 149.3 | 21.1 |
| Middle of eclipse | 23:40.1 | 155.5 | 23.1 |
| Moon leaves totality | 00:06.4 | 161.8 | 24.7 |
| Moon leaves umbra | 01:17.4 | 179.8 | 26.4 |
| Moon leaves penumbra | 02:14.8 | 194.3 | 25.0 |
| Sunrise | 05:51 | —- | —- |
| Moonset | 06:08 | 241.7 | —- |

Next one is in November, so will be much higher in the sky…

“blog.org”:http://blog.org/archives/cat_useful_web_resources.html#000716 → “Playing with Time”:http://www.playingwithtime.org/ :

bq. “Playing With Time”:http://www.playingwithtime.org/ is an exciting, new project that looks at how the world around you is changing over many different time periods.

bq. Here at the “Playing With Time”:http://www.playingwithtime.org/ web site, unseen worlds of change will be revealed. You will see time sped up and slowed down, and behold the beauty of change.

I have always been intrigued by visualisation techniques; manipulating time is another one. Taking ordinary events and speeding them up or slowing them down often reveals existing patterns that we cannot normally perceive.

“Playing With Time”:http://www.playingwithtime.org/ has both fast motion and slow motion movie clips revealing a variety of changes. I particularly like the shots of the same location on several different time scales; you can watch the clouds move over a period of minutes, or see the tide roll out, or see the grass grow and die over a year. Fabulous stuff, and worth a visit.

Robert L. Park has written The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science:

bq. I began this list of warning signs to help federal judges detect scientific nonsense. But as I finished the list, I realized that in our increasingly technological society, spotting voodoo science is a skill that every citizen should develop.

The list:

# The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.
# The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.
# The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.
# Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.
# The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.
# The discoverer has worked in isolation.
# The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.

From a New Scientist article:

bq. Buildings of the future could be “clothed” in a flexible, power-generating material that looks like denim. The Canadian company developing the material says it can be draped over just about any shape – greatly expanding the number of places where solar power can be generated.

Cool; another Canadian company working on alternative power systems. This particular material has about the same efficieny as regular solar panels. However, it apparently looks something like denim, which makes for _interesting_ building designs…

ACPI and FreeBSD – looks like the newly released version of FreeBSD is the first major UNIX distribution to support ACPI hibernate. Cool; I’ve only had an ACPI laptop for two years…

Right now I run Windows 2000 on my laptop, and run RedHat Linux (under VMware); all this so that I can run my unix-based e-mail software in a portable, hibernatable environment. I’d like to simplify a bit.

the Linux 2.5 kernel has ACPI support (they apparently had to do a major rewrite of the driver architecture to support it), but 2.5 isn’t stable enough for my purposes yet.

So, maybe my next block of “play around with the computer” spare time will go to a FreeBSD install…

On the other hand, while writing this article, I discovered swsusp, a program that lets you do suspend-to-disk without BIOS support. Time to check that out too.

We’re just 12 years away, but I’m reasonably sure that hovercars aren’t going to be an option, nor will 512K Macs sit in antique store windows. 2015 will look like 1990, because you can’t photograph wireless networks. The best part of the future is always invisible.

From a brief discussion of Back to the Future II by James Lileks. I found it via the Quote of the Day mailing list.

Visit the site and build The best paper airplane in the world!.

This is similar to a design I used to fly as a kid, and that one worked very well. This one adds a few extra folds to move the center of gravity low and forward, which improves stability and hang time.

Apple – PowerBook G4 17″

1″ thick, 6.8lbs, 1Ghz G4, 512Mb, 17″ display @ 1440×900, 60Gb drive, slot-load DVD-writer, GeForce4 440, gigabit ethernet, 54Mbps wireless network, Bluetooth, FireWire 800, 4.5 hours battery life… And it runs MacOS X, the FreeBSD/Mac hybrid OS that is apparently a UNIX geek’s wet dream.

I think putting Gb ethernet on a laptop is ridiculous; ISPs and large corporations are starting to use Gb ethernet for backbones and interconnects; it’s wasted on a laptop. Still, a machine to drool over, and only $3299 (US).

Atmospheric a-bomb testing comes back to haunt us. An article in New Scientist describes high levels of radioactive material in sea-bird guano, particularly uranium-238, radium-226, and cesium-137, the last of which does not occur naturally.

Particularly in the arctic, plants eat guano; animals eat plants; humans eat animals; all the while, radioactivity accumulates.

Someday we’ll wake up and realize we have to *live* in our own shit; we can’t just get rid of it. Hopefully that day won’t come too late…

Finally, some reseachers have shown that those ickly overhead flourescent lights really do cause eyestrain in computer users. An article in Realage’s HealthBytes Newsletter, claims

a significant decrease in eyestrain, eye fatigue, sensitivity to light, blur with computer use, and glare or reflections from the computer screen

when overhead flourescents were fitted with an acrylic filter tinted to give off “more natural light”.

Ye gods, I despise overhead flourescents. I’m glad to see more concrete research in this area…

According to this article in New Scientist, China will attempt to launch a manned spacecraft in the second half of 2003. They’ve already successfully launched four fully functional, but unmanned, capsules.

It’ll be nice to have some competition again; maybe that’ll push the US space program out of the doldrums…

In related news, TV makes men hunkier and women chunkier.

Apparently due to “quirks” in our vision processing, 2D pictures of people look larger to us than corresponding 3D images. Strange…

Centrefold models getting more androgynous

Based on 577 consecutive montly issues of Playboy, researchers graphed trends in height, body mass index, and waist to hip ratio. Wow, that would be a fun job; we always joke about scientific excuses for looking at naked women :-). Anyway, they discovered that:

• BMI is dropping (20 to 18), making models skinnier
• bust size is dropping, and waist to hip ratio is rising, making models less “hour-glass” shaped and more tubular
• height is increasing, while weight remains constant

The net result; models are becoming less “classically” feminine, and more androgynous.

The real question is: are mens’ preferences changing, and is the media (including Playboy) documenting or causing the changes?

I found today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day somewhat depressing. It’s been 30 years since we put a man on the moon, and what have we done since then? A partially blind telescope and a couple of piddly little space stations.

“It’s the year 2000, but where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars? I don’t see any flying cars? Why? Why? Why?” – Avery Brooks – IBM Commercial

New Scientist reports that Mathematics unravels optimum way of shoe lacing…

There are many millions of different possibilities but, reassuringly, the proof shows that centuries of human trial and error has already selected out the strongest lacing patterns.

It’s nice to know that we humans can get something right…

(first seen in andersja’s blog)