Technology: September 2005 Archive Page

Did anyone have the right to be so little changed by the voyage as Armstrong seems to have been? “How long must it take before I cease to be known as a spaceman?” he asked a reporter seven years after coming home. --Thomas Mallon reviews James R. Hansen's First Man. --Moon Walker: How Neil Armstrong brought the space program down to earth. (The New Yorker)

Great, moody review of a book on one of my favorite subjects.

PC Gamers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Retail Chains! --Manifesto Games

Grek Gostikyan, science fiction author and game developer, resigned from Nokia in order to invest his energies in the indie game development movement. He blogs at Games * Art * Design * Culture.

The shuttle has cost the lives of 14 astronauts since the first flight in 1982. Roger Pielke Jr., a space policy expert at the University of Colorado, estimates that NASA has spent about $150 billion on the program since its inception in 1971. The total cost of the space station by the time it's finished -- in 2010 or later -- may exceed $100 billion, though other nations will bear some of that. --Traci Watson --NASA administrator says space shuttle was a mistake (USA Today)

This is painful to read. As an elementary student, I wrote to NASA in the 1970s, and somehow wound up on a mailing list for teachers. For years I received thick glossy publications full of diagrams and artist's renderings of planned missions.

I can barely remember the post-moon space program, and I think I remember news coverage of the abandonment of Skylab in 1974. I would have been about nine when Skylab burned up on re-entry in 1979, and I remember that well.

I was always thought more seriously about writing about such things than actually builiding or flying in them, but of course I daydreamed.

"Don't panic over the latest techno jargon like ... peer-to-peer, wi-max, 80211, bittorrent ... the only thing that gives purpose to all these remarkable delivery systems is the kind of creative content we all produce," Eisner said. --Eisner's parting words to Hollywood: "Don't panic" (Breitbart.com)

I don't feel much pity for the hordes of netizens who are downloading copyrighted entertainment material because they feel their "need" to consume it exceeds their willingness to pay.

I'm thoroughly amused by how the entertainment industry, which has trained three generations of Americans to mistrust authority and seek pleasure at all cost, is now trying to preach ethics in order to stop massive file-sharing.

But, when isolated like this, Eisner's statement sounds pretty arrogant.

The term "peer-to-peer" is not synonymous with "stealing Hollywood's content," and the internet didn't need Hollywood in order to rise to its current level of cultural importance.

But the main thrust of Eisner's speech, that the entertainment industry has in the past learned to embrace the very technology that it initially fought off, is worth hearing. Too bad he's only saying it on his way out the door.

In addition to a Sony PlayStation 2, the family has some special equipment: a S.M.A.R.T. BrainGames system that consists of a special controller, a helmet with built-in sensors for monitoring brain activity and a Smartbox that receives the brain signals.

As long as the boys remain calmly focused on the game, it plays normally, says their Philadelphia psychologist Domenic Greco. But if a player's mind wanders, the Smartbox sends a signal to the controller hindering acceleration or character movement in the game. --Mike Snider --Video games actually can be good for you (USA Today)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Back then, most directors were too old to play games, and clearly didn't bother to observe anyone who did. But to be fair to Hollywood, game culture is also hard to film because so much of a game's appeal is internal. All the strategizing, the mental mapping, the cybernetic thrill of being in a loop with a complex system: That's all invisible. It happens inside your head. As TV critic Neil Postman noted, "The act of thinking is not televisable." Games suffer from precisely the same problem. That's why directors resort to such exaggerated physical cues -- the bugged-out eyes, the twitching -- in an attempt to paint the excitement of game-playing on the outside of a player's body.

But I think the tide has finally turned. These days, half the movies I see have engaging, witty depictions of everyday gamers, none of whom are latent homicidal maniacs. --Clive Thompson --Gamers Get a Hollywood Makeover (Wired)

Usually once a decade an invention comes along that makes everyone revise the way they think about an accepted form of technology. In the first decade of the 21st Century the invention is Uni-Screw?.

Uniscrew? replaces Slotted, Phillips,? Pozi-Drive,? Torx? and Square Head style screws and offers significant advantages compared to these fastening mediums. As such, Uniscrew? represents the most significant development in fastener technology for decades! --What is Uni-Screw? (Uni-Screw)

I like hexagons quite a bit, and I happen to like fasteners and tools, so naturally this product appeals to me.

But the language of the website reminds me of this article from The Onion: "Amazing New Hyperbolic Chamber Greatest Invention In The History Of Mankind Ever.

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Update, 07 Jul 2008: Link is dead... Wayback Archive, uniscrew.com.

In these days of instant messaging, e-mail, videophones and nearly instantaneous satellite communication with all parts of the world, the idea of communicating by telegraph is perhaps best described as "quaint."

However, it would be difficult to overestimate the impact that the telegraph had on worldwide communications at the time of its introduction. --The road less traveled: telegraph stamps (Linns.com)

Best quote from the article: "Philatelic literature on telegraph stamps is far from abundant..."

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Clutching the shredded tatters of my pride and dignity, I trudged to the office hours of my math instructor every week, seeking an explanation for the increasingly mysterious problems in the textbook. My instructor welcomed my presence as she would welcome the Angel of Death. Irritated? She was terrified. Explain…the problems? Articulate…the steps? Relate…the concepts? I would ask questions, and she would respond by completing yet another sample problem as fast as she possibly could, blushing nervously. I felt like I was on a Star Trek episode. "Captain, I think I understand…the creature communicates through multivariable calculus problems!"

I know what you're thinking, and you're wrong. She was as American as I am. Spoke perfect colloquial English. --Douglas Kern --Confessions of an Engineering Washout (Tech Central Station)

My first teaching job was in what was at the time called the Engineering Writing Centre at the University of Toronto.

Of course, pretty much any reference to Star Trek is blog-worthy to me, but I already decided to blog this when I saw a different excerpt on Joanne Jacobs.

Her points don't directly apply to Seton Hill, since we don't have teaching assistants and we don't have an engineering school, but I still found the subject interesting.

The original handwritten manuscript of what became Alice in Wonderland has been put online using software to virtually turn the pages.

Alice's Adventures Under Ground, by Lewis Carroll, is the latest 3D addition to the British Library's Turning the Pages collection of books. --Original Alice work in 3D online (BBC)

I had to hunt on the British Library website to find a link to the page this article is talking about. That's completely silly -- what a waste of an online news item if it reports on a web page but doesn't include a link to it. I'd also say that "in 3D" is a bit misleading. It's just a digital manipulation of a 2D scan. And instead of just clicking on a page to make it turn, you have to click and drag, but half the time the page slips out of my virtual fingers, so I have to grab at it again. Annoying.

I'm not sure the direct link to Alice will work, but here's the Turning the Pages table of contents.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. --Lorem Ipsum

I was preparing a new handout, where I want to use colored text in order to demonstrate several possible ways to organize an essay. I don't want the students to get focused on the particulars of the text, so I reached for this filler, which has been used by printers for hundreds of years.

Translation (according to this site): "On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains."

Hmm. My Latin's a bit rusty, but I don't see exactly where the words match up. Ah, well.

Gotta get some lorem ipsum?

Check out the lorem ipsm generator.

It perfectly pulls together four important tools that no geek should ever be without (USB flash drive, LED light, Swiss Army knife, ballpoint pen). These functions have been skillfully integrated into this single super tool. Along with all these great features you also get the legendary construction quality and materials that Swiss Army knives have become famous for throughout the world. The USB flash drive portion of the knife can easily be removed, for safe airline travel (and successful passage thru security).
--Okay, please stop drooling (Think Geek)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

>>(makes fake cough sounding like "birthday")<<

>>(makes fake cough sounding like "October 11")<<

Hey, maybe I could use this to carve that.

--Wooden Case Mod... and more

My jaw dropped and I literally gasped when I saw these images. Are they real? Not a phenomenal CGI project? It doesn't matter -- it's beautiful! Thanks for the link, Will!

By the way, my birthday's coming up next month... hint, hint!

Customers create any structure they can imagine using Lego's freely downloadable Digital Designer software. If they then decide to actually build their creation, the software, which keeps track of which pieces are required, sends the order to this corner of the Enfield warehouse. There, employees put all the pieces (which are grouped in standardized bags) into a box, along with instructions, and ship it off. "We've been toying with this idea for a long time," says Steven Hawco, vice president of Lego's Shop at Home division, which is overseeing the project. "And now technology is giving us the ability to actually do this." --Michael A. Prospero
--Brick by Brick: Lego's New Building Blocks (Fast Company)

Isn't that a cute graphic by Henry Yung? Brilliant idea.

--BlogSearch (Google)

Google's new blog search engine. Looks like it pays too much attention to splogs (fake websites that look like blogs, but exist only to drive traffic to commercial sites). Nevertheless, I found a few references to SHU blogs that I didn't see in other search engines.

Discovering that the static that came through our phone could bring the dead, tv-looking thing on our table to life was one of the most fascinating moments of my youth and young manhood. Sadly, that tone is almost gone from our world now, as dial-up disappears in favor of broadband connections (and rightly so). But even better was discovering what kind of life lay in wait on the other end of the line.

[...]

Here was something big, bigger than school and sports and whatever synagogue I never showed up at for my rite of passage into manhood, and we were involved. My father was part of this thing that was happening, this thing that was cooler than men walking on the moon because it was right there in front of you and you could do it too. And I was doing it, and it was more than just pushing buttons. My own little 12-year-old's text-based programming adventures didn't come anywhere near what was happening in Adventure, but that wasn't the point. The point was that what was coming back to me in little green letters or smudged black ink was something I had brought into being, my contribution to the world. For me, listening to the static song of the modem carrier signal or sitting in front of that clunky, clacketing teletype meant that I was charged, for however many minutes I could get, with the responsibility of creating something cool. And there's no better drug for a pre-teen nerd than that, no more solemn burden to shoulder.

I never did make it to my Bar Mitzvah. But I'm pretty sure I learned some of the same lessons, thanks to dad and DEC and the big machines that did turn out to spark a revolution after all. --Mark Wallace --The History of My Adventure (Walkerings)

As much as I love both technology and games, I can't help but think of Henry Adams contemplating the dynamo.

But I'm not one to point a finger. I enjoyed Wallace's soulful, geeky hymn to the power of technology -- as mediated by text-adventure games.

New media, he said, breaks down the economic model of the business he has worked in all these years. "This is really the first time since William Randolph Hearst that a young journalist can think like an entrepreneur," Mr. Jarvis said. --Tania Ralli --A Journalist and Blogger Tries Teaching (New York Times)

Our academic dean sent me this link.

Jeff Jarvis, an entertainment reporter who recently took up blogging, posted on his own blog about his career shift:

I knew I wanted to work in the future of media and I believe there’s no better place to do that than among the young people who will be media tomorrow. I don’t want to teach them so much as learn from them as they invent the ways that journalism can use this powerful new thing, this unmedium, that we’ve only begun to explore to gather and share news. I hope we have an environment that fosters creativity and learning as it teaches skills and standards (and I hope I find less haughty ways to say that).

She says one of the most powerful facilities in weblogs is pinging, which involves a person posting a comment about someone else's work on their own blog.

They use the 'TrackBack' tool to notify the author when they have published the comment, basically inviting them to discuss it.

"It alerts the original author that someone has written about them. That's powerful."

Bartlett-Bragg says while not everyone responds to comments on their work, many do, and this is a real bonus for students. --Anna Salleh --Blogs help students think for themselves (ABCnet.au)

I'm encountering some resistance as I ask students to pick up the TrackBack habit. It's still very early in the semester, and the new students are just getting the hang of academic blogging. So we'll see what happens.

Two secretaries at one of Sydney's top law firms have been sacked after a catty email exchange that was circulated around the city's legal and financial district. --Secretaries sacked after cyber brawl (News.com.au)

Think before you push "send". Think before you blog. Think before you write. Think before you talk.

Different technologies, same lesson.

Even if you're squeaky clean, an employer still could find dirt attached to your name -- if someone with the same name is out there ranting on Nazi-type sites or proposing odd activities with orangutans. --Patricia Kitchen --Expect recruiters to Google you for ''digital dirt'' (Newsday|Seattle Times)

Thanks, Katie, for suggesting this story.

The Wikipedia, which has surged this year to become the most popular reference site on the Web, is fast overtaking several major news sites as the place where people swarm for context on breaking events.

Traffic to the multilingual network of sites has grown 154 percent over the past year, according to research firm Hitwise. At current growth rates, it is set to overtake The New York Times on the Web, the Drudge Report and other news sites. --Wikipedia Overtaking Major News Sites (CNN)

We're still covering the basic differences between print, online, and TV journalism in my news writing class, so I'm not ready to introduce this topic just yet. But I'll blog it so I can find it.

The PocketMod is a new way to keep yourself organized. Lets face it, PDA's are to expensive and cumbersome, and organizers are bulky and hard to carry around. Nothing beats a folded up piece of paper. That is until now. --The PocketMod

It is a folded-up piece of paper, but such a cool piece of paper! When I was an undergraduate, I had a geeky calendar program, and I would print out a single page with a week's worth of appointments and notes. At the end of the day, I'd transfer notes from the paper to my computer, and the next morning before I left I'd print out the next week's notes.

Then one day when I was walking past a Radio Shack, I saw a pocket-sized brochure advertising the Palm. I put the brochure in my shirt pocket, and before long I had the real thing in there. I've hardly removed it since. But still, sometimes I miss my sheets of paper -- reminding me of a time in my life when, if I had read the required number of pages and produced the required number of papers, I was done, and I had official permission from the universe to slack off for a while -- at least until somebody else told me what to do next. (Oh, the joys of youth.)

Via Metafilter.

--Bus-ted! Update (Junkyard Blog)

This satellite photo shows some 255 unused buses in a flooded New Orleans lot. (Found via Instapundit.) The photo -- found, I presume, via Google Earth, and mailed to a weblog by a reader -- depicts an unused escape route for some 15,000 New Orleans citizens. The blog, which defends George Bush against attacks from the left, represents another example of the power that citizens have -- we can access Google's images of the Earth, analyze them, and publish our findings. While amateur sleuthing is probably not the way to definitive answers, it can raise powerful questions.

Bush himself has to answer questions raised by photos of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, coffins returning from Iraq, and war death in general. But for now I’ll consider Katrina’s aftermath.

Why the National Guard took so many days to get into the city baffles me, as does the sight of these unused buses.

The New Orleans mayor is understandably stressed, so I can understand his cry for help:

I need 500 buses, man. We ain't talking about -- you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about getting public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out here. I'm like, “You got to be kidding me. This is a national disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans.”

But one has to ask -- why didn't the city's bus drivers get off their asses and get the refugees out?

The answer is, of course, that no one person made a single mistake that caused this disaster. Not President George W. Bush, not Ray Nagin, not the bus drivers (who were presumably doing their best to take care of their families) and not the tens of thousands of individuals who chose to ride out the storm. Few disasters are really the fault of one person. Consider the grade of steel used in the construction of the Titanic, the captain’s decision to keep up speed despite the warnings he’d received of icebergs, the telegraph operator’s decision not to deliver to the captain all the warnings he received, an administrative decision to remove several rows of lifeboats in order to give the upper-class passengers more deck space – the list goes on and on.

Between the rage of those who attack George Bush for not being God ("We'd have been able to control the weather if there were a Democrat in the White House! As a senator, didn't Al Gore take the initiative in inventing a weather-control machine?") and the indignation of others who still think he can walk on water, I still find it shocking that the stories of death and misery -- not only in New Orleans, but also in the surrounding area -- are coming from within my own country.

Update: Upon re-reading this entry, I think I may have given the impression that all the people who rode out the storm in New Orleans did so by choice. Many were trapped. But to the passengers of the Titanic, who weren't aware of the extent of the damage, staying on board the ship (which still had lights and where the officers seemed to be in charge) seemed a lot more sensible than taking one's chances on the open sea. Few people who make bad survival decisions live to regret their errors; so people who've lived through rough times tend to get the feeling that disasters happen to other people (hence my earlier shock to realize that these reports were coming from the world's only remaining superpower). This isn't about policy or politics, it's about human psychology.

As my original column made clear (and many amid the outcry reiterated) when it comes to blogging, I just don't "get it." That's right, I don't. Many in the tenured generation don't, and they'll be sitting on hiring committees for years to come.

If that's bad news, I'm sorry. But would it really be better if no one bothered to mention it? --"Ivan Tribble" --They Shoot Messengers, Don't They? (Chronicle)

Tribble responds to the outcry against a column in which he warned academic bloggers that the search committees on which he has served have all considered blogging to be a negative in the hiring process.

Tribble commends Matt Kirschenbaum for inviting bloggers to assemble evidence for a rebuttal.

Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a "new view") is a complete Web Authoring System that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page editing. Nvu is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding. --NVu (NVu.com)

A former student suggested this for the next time I teach web authoring. The last time I taught "Writing for the Internet," we jumped right into blogging, which slowed us down when we moved on to design, and suddenly cyberspace wasn't push-button simple anymore. Next time, I'm going to bite the bullet and teach some basic HTML along with blogging, but once I've done that, I'll move to a WYSIWYG editor. I'd been using FrontPage Express, simply because it's free and small enough that students can put it on their portable drives or use it at home, but it's an ancient program by now.

I hope the program is less geeky than the silly acronym, but the reviews I've seen look very good. Hurrah for open source!

Private vs. Public
• Anyone can read this: professors, classmates
• Don’t write about your love life or last weekend’s activities unless you want your professors (or the academic dean) to read about it
• Take caution when complaining about classes or classmates
  
• Also, watch what you write – don’t link to pictures of you doing anything illegal while at school. Someone will invariably turn you in.

Academic=Thought
• As with everything, try not to make hasty generalizations about issues, and don’t be offensive to people or groups!
• Don’t start out your homework assignments with the title: “Homework.” That is very boring. Few will actually read it.
• Add links and use them well. Don’t type out the address – make the words describing the link be the link.
• Don't plagarize, and attribute what you "borrow."

Foster Discussion

• Comment on other people’s blogs. It makes them feel loved and needed.
• Intellectual sparring is okay, but few people enjoy personal attacks
• If you write it, it will be misunderstood
• Use emoticons when you think you might be taken the wrong way (but don’t use them when blogging or commenting on a serious or professional issue)

The Upside
• Your own weblog not only gives you a handy personal publishing outlet, but it also is much better than jweb's forums.
  
• You get to know your classmates better. Make friends through your blog.
• Future employers might read your blog, and might want to hire you because of it.
• Well-thought-out weblogs aren’t born every day – just look at the recently updated lists of Blogger.com and LiveJournal. You’ll stand out in a crowd.

Helpful hint: before you click “save,” highlight and copy it should MT foul-up. Also, thanks to all of you who provided examples for this educational purpose... ;) --Julie Young --Getting the most out of your academic weblog (Work in Progress)

A good overview, written by a former student who has since graduated.

[T]he geek bloggers are in decline and there is very little they can do about it. But before the flames start let me explain further because I’ve been tossing up the title of this post for about 24 hours, some of the other titles included: time for the geek bloggers to get a reality check, and 3G the new blogging generation. All 3 titles sum it up.

[...]

Blogging has essentially developed in waves or generations, each of which was notable for the backgrounds of the majority of people entering the blogosphere at each point. --The demise of the geek bloggers (The Blog Herald)

The three generations, according to The Blog Herald:

1G: the geek generation (1998-2002)
2G: the extrovert generation (2002-2004)
3G: the consumer bloggers (2005+)

Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index. --Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index (The Onion (Satire))

Hooray! It looks like The Onion's archives are available online for free now. They've also changed the headline, which used to be a graphic, into text. That makes it much easier to copy-and-paste the headline into a blog page. (Previously, I had to retype it.)

My news writing students are going to be paying a visit to these archives....