Category Archives: Inevitabilities

Things that just seem to be … inevitable!

Microsoft … making Windows irrelevant?

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Sometimes I think that “old people” really don’t get it. When I say “old people” I’m pointing at the twenty-somethings and up. Yeah … once you get into your college years, you begin to formulate a lot of perspectives and hold onto them. You hold onto a “religion” about things … even technology.

I have long listened to all of the complaining and whining about Microsoft. Frankly, I’m tired of it. Most people simply want to blame their problems on others, and attack the current king of the hill. It’s a human disease. The worst part of it is that I believe it causes people to loose sight of what is going on around them, and to fall victim to changing markets.

On Tuesday when I was at the LearnKey Challenge at UVSC, I got to listen to a presentation by Ivan Lumala called XNA Xbox 360 Development Framework. If you click the link, you can see his presentation. I have to admit that I was blown away. I had no idea what Microsoft was doing in this space … and the potential impact on the future. Most people … caught up in their whining about Microsoft and Windows are completely missing what is coming at them.

XNA is the development environment for the Xbox 360. Actually … it’s much more than this. XNA Game Studio Express is a – completely free – development environment for creating cross-platform applications that can run on the Windows, or the Xbox 360. Microsoft is quickly pushing to allow any software developer to create their own games and applications … and to build out the community of Xbox 360 developers and users. They are providing the source code for some amazing applications and games as the foundation for anyone that wants to create “your world. your game.” These sample applications are written in C# and can be compiled to run on Windows and the Xbox 360. If you want to learn more … read here!

So what is it that the old folks are missing? It’s that the younger generations are now seeing a much different Microsoft. They aren’t hanging on to their long-term “make wrong” and complaints about Microsoft. It was amazing to see … when Ivan walked in, and started to get set-up, there were the typical jeers and comments about Windows. But when Ivan asked how many students (all high-school) had an Xbox or Xbox 360 almost all of the hands went up. He asked about the games they play and they all started to shout out the names of the big classic Xbox games. He asked them who might want to write their own games that they could give away or sell for the Xbox 360 … the level of excitment continued to grow.

Now let me throw out some possible scenarios. What if Microsoft produced a “portable Xbox 360” that has a screen? Sort of a UMPC based on the Xbox 360 hardware? What if they created a laptop based on this Xbox 360 hardware? What occurs in 3 or 5 years as the younger generations have no qualms with the “Xbox 360” … a word that now represents a hardware platform, coupled with a form of operating system, and an open development environment? What occurs when these – now college – students might be able to run other productivity applications on this platform?

I wonder how this might compare to the current craze around the proprietary Apple MacBooks? (There are lots of numbers out there about Xbox 360 sales, and Apple MacBook sales. ) Could this be a way that Microsoft themselves actually makes “Windows” irrelevant, and has the next generations of college graduates and business workers continue to embrace Microsoft products?

I have to admit that coupled with Silverlight, I believe that Microsoft is making some strong moves to secure its future … even with all of the complaining and whining by old people!

P.S. Get over it … Microsoft has helped to create everything that we have to date! They will always have their place … and if you underestimate them, they might even end up with more!

LearnKey Challenge Presentation – Wearable Computers, etc.

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For the last number of years I have had the privilege to present to high-school students from all over the state of Utah when they participate in a “Challenge” at the UVSC campus. The “Challenge” is allow the students to demonstrate their understanding of technology and computer skills. This used to be the “TestOut Challenge” but this year there is a new sponsor and so it’s the “LearnKey Challenge”. On Tuesday I got to do this again and had a blast.
Each year I’ve been asked to present on Wearable Computers and Virtual/Augmented/Mediated Reality. This is an area that I am really interested in as the man/machine interfaces continue to evolve … and computers and peripherals begin to become more embedded. I love to show the students the miniature computers and hardware, and to show them the hardware that I have collected over the years. I also love to shown them the videos of some of the advanced research going on around the world in these areas. If you want an idea, go and check out ARQuake and the Tinmith project, and the Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore, the HIT Lab at the U of Washington, or the work of Steve Mann at the U of Toronto.
The real reason that I love to give these presentations is to see if I can encourage and inspire some of these kids to think out of the box. I want them to get my enthusiasm about technology, and what is coming in the near future … to expose them to things that seem almost too far in the future … things they might not understand they could be involved with. Some of this work is pushing the limits of what we believe is possible … stuff of dreams. I want these kids to know they too can get involved and create the future … and play with some really cool computer stuff. This year they even recorded the presentations and put them all on-line … my Wearable & Mobile Computers is here! One warning … most of the initial presentation is about tech jobs, my experiences, what to expect, and what to consider to love your job.

It was fun to have so many of the student come up afterwards and ask questions … where to learn more … what degrees to pursue … where to go to school. Overall … they seemed to enjoy it, and I know that I did. If I made a difference with just one of these kids it’s all worth while.

I wouldn’t want to be AMD in a Wintel world …

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I have to admit that I really haven’t had much to complain about AMD and their products … until recently. I have long been an Intel fan, but I had no reason to believe that AMD was not “Intel-compatible”. Over the last year, I bought a few rack-mount systems that contained AMD motherboards and processors. I was able to install Linux (Fedora Core 4) on them, and everything seemed well. All of that ended about three months ago.

About three months back, I chose to take one of my rack-mount systems, and reconfigure it to take the place of one of my last two Novell NetWare servers. (Yes … I worked for Novell and still have two NetWare boxes running some services … if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!) To replace the one NetWare box, I needed to have two network cards in the server. Easy enough … I’ve done this with Linux before … add the card, configure the driver/interface settings, and off you go. Now I’m not doing this as a full time job, so this is something that I do when I have the time late at night … between e-mail, blogging, coding, etc.

I installed an old 3Com 10/100 ethernet card into the working system, and chose to reinstall Linux from scratch … a brand new shiny copy of Fedora Core 6! It installed on the AMD hardware flawlessly … until I rebooted. The 3Com ethernet card would not obtain a DHCP address. Hmmm. I went through Google, tried a different card … an Intel 10/100. Same results. The ethernet on the motherboard worked … the card in the PCI slot seemed to work, but wouldn’t get an IP address. I ended up going through three more cards (five total!) and then tried Fedora Core 4, and Fedora Core 2, then Knoppix. Crap!

All of this was done over a period of two months … on and off … trying various things one or maybe two nights a week. I ended up doing dozens of installations before trying to install Windows XP. It installed flawlessly … and both adapters worked! Crap! Crap! So now I’m starting to guess … Linux and this AMD motherboard? I took the machine to a friends place and had him look at it also … and he gave up.

Last week I went and bought an Intel motherboard, and Intel processor, and installed it into the rack-mount case … replacing the AMD hardware. I ran through the Fedora Core 6 installation … rebooted … and everything worked as expected! Both cards were recognized, and obtained addresses … I did some reconfiguration and testing and now am close to having my machine ready to install in my data center.

If only I had given up on the AMD/Linux combination sooner … I truly wasted far too many hours not believing that such an incompatibility could exist. But it did … crap, crap, crap. I have learned my lesson … at this point I don’t care if I ever buy another piece of AMD hardware again .. it’s just not worth my time. My Intel solutions? They just work!

Radio to WordPress Migration … finally!

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After using Radio Userland for the last 6+ years of blogging, I have finally completed my migration to WordPress.  Well … mostly.  I’m still working out the kinks, and I’m still working on my new WordPress2Blogger bridge which will mirror my posts – based on categories – to my bloggger.com blogs.

Overall, it was a real pain.  I’m not looking forward to having to do this again.  I had some time to work on it over the last couple of weeks, and had actually done most of the ground work.  I am thinking that I’ll outline some of the steps and issues that I ent through to accomplish this.

  1. Export the Radio database to a RSS.XML file.  To do this I first located a tool for Radio called the backLogAllRSS tool written by Steve Hooker.  After installing it, I found that I actually had to hack the code … it turns out that any post that did not include *any* category would not be exported to the RSS.XML file.  (If you really want my hacked tool, contact me … I’ll post it someplace!)  Once I figured that out, and had hacked the code, I then exported all of my categories, and made sure that the Auto paragraphs options was *not* checked.
  2. Edit the exported RSS.XML.  When I got all of my posts exported, I then had to do a global search and replace on one thing … the apostrophes.  Radio had escaped them all to be “'” and for some reason the WordPress import did not return them to being an apostrophe.
  3. Import into WordPress.  I ought to mention now that I only learned about the code hacking and global search and replace after numerous failed imports.  Well … they worked, but what I got what not formatted properly, or has the escaped characters.  Or … lots of posts were missing because they were not in a category.  By about the 8th or 10 import I was finally getting close.  I was using the RSS Import capability, under the Import menu in WordPress.  I actually thought I was done.  Until I noticed that the dates and times on all of the imported posts were wrong!  It turns out that although the Radio tool exports all of the posts with the proper data and time adjusted to GMT … and labeled as such … the WordPress RSS Import seems to ignore the “GMT” designation and just assumes that you are importing from your time zone.  So now I had to hack the WordPress RSS Import code to add the proper offset of seconds to each post being imported.  Again … if someone really wants my WordPress RSS Import hack,, let me know and I’ll send it to you.

In the end, it was an interesting exercise.  I’m actually going to do it again, since my father is still using Radio and I’m now going to migrate him over to WordPress.  I’ll see if there is anything that I left out in the steps.

One thing that I have to admit is that I truly enjoy the breadth of plug-ins for WordPress!  I’ve already found useful ones like the “delete post database” plug-in … this one is very helpful when you import 6+ years of posts and the formatting is all screwed up!  I also found a great Tag plug-in, and then a good basis for my upcoming blogger.com plug-in which worked with their old API.

I’m sure that I’ll learn more … I’m just glad to have it done!  Now, I just have to learn how to get Onfolio to post to WordPress … I like the aggregator, and want to use it to post!

Will it make a difference?

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I missed this announcement, and although I applaud the efforts of
Honda, I really have to wonder if it will make much of a
difference? Airbags for motorcycles? The two points that
caught my attention is that it is intended from accidents up to 31 mph
… and that really is not too fast. Remember that if you are
hitting a moving object, and it is coming towards you, then you have to
add the two speeds of the
vehicles together. So in a head-on collision, if you are going 25
mph, then the other vehicle can not be going over 6 mph? And the
article also mention that this solution is intended for straight-angle
– or head-on – collisions. Again … I like the idea and applaud
the efforts … I’m just not sure that it will assist much in teh
majority of accidents. I know that the one person it saves will
make the whole thing worth it.

Honda debuts motorcycle airbag.
Blog: Honda Motor on Thursday took the wraps off its first airbag
designed to protect motorcyclists in the event of a crash. … [CNET News.com]

Ray Kurzweil Interviewed by Moira Gunn @ AC2005

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This interview was really a chance for Ray to answer questions that
were submitted by people here at the conference.  The interview
started off with a question about sex in the future.  It was great
to get things rolling, and there were numerous laughs on some of the
comments.

Of course Ray quickly progressed into commenting on uploading, brain
scanning, alternate substrates, etc.  Overall … a usual great
Q&A by Ray.

And more uses for Carbon Nanotubes

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I have to admit that I really like to hear about all of the medical
advances using new technologies.  Of course it is only going to
accelerate and get better.  This is some interesting work using carbon nanotubes to assist in bone healing.

Carbon nanotubes help heal broken bones.
Carbon nanotubes make an ideal scaffold for the growth of bone tissue,
chemist Robert Haddon of the University of California, Riverside, has
found.

The new technique could change the way doctors treat broken bones, allowing them to simply inject … [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]

Meat farming?

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This is a very interesting article about some possible future foods …
grown in a lab.  Oh … and it is not plants that are being grown
… it is meat!Will this end up being the future of farming?

Burgers from a lab? US study says it’s possible.
Laboratories using new tissue engineering technology might be able to
produce meat that is healthier for consumers and cut down on pollution
produced by factory farming, University of Maryland researchers said.

Scientists could grow cells from the… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]

Pumping out the pollution

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I have to admit that I am surprised that I am not reading more from the
extreme environmentalists about the pumping out of New Orleans. 
All I have heard is what a polluted “soup” that is there … and these
huge pumps are now moving all of that pollution into the adjoining
lakes, canals, and the ocean!

What?  Save people and destroy the environment?  How dare
they even think it!  I can’t even imagine the massive amounts of
environmental damage being caused by the horrible people pumping this
toxic soup!

Oh … I guess in this case maybe they will suggest that since the
hurricane already caused enough damage, a little more won’t hurt? 
Or maybe this time, since the impact on humanity is so blatantly
obvious, they’ll let things slide.  Who knows …