Can technology save itself?

We stand in the pre-dawn darkness of a new era. Our technology is sufficiently powerful to prove it's potential, a kind of elevator-pitch, but not powerful enough to control its own destiny. This presents a problem, initially for us but more importantly for the technology itself.

Right now the principles of the singularity, Genomics, Nanotechnology and Robotics are provable technologies that can, in some measure, be used to produce useful objects but are still very much in the domain of mankind, with all his failings. It is very likely that even as you read this, someone in their own little lab or even in a great state-funded complex is busily creating a virus that is destined to become a biological terror weapon. As I mentioned before on this blog, the first principles of AI and robotics will likely be applied to autonomous vehicles that will take jobs away from a great swathe of the population and incur the wrath of man such that the technology becomes a target for Luddite principles.

The hope of all Transhumanists is that these technologies will progress to become a benign enabling power for the general good of the human race and indeed, the planet as a whole. At the moment however, the technology progresses only because of mankind's intervention and will to make it so. There is a risk that given the right circumstances, mankind could turn against technology and stifle it in it's cradle.

The past has shown us that when people's livelihoods are adversely affected by the march of technology, there comes a period of unrest in which people try to reverse the changes. The Luddite movement and the acts of "Frame Breaking" were carried out by weavers opposed to the use of automated looms. The Luddites used hammers and garden tools against the technology and were not successful but a modern day Luddite would not hesitate to use the tools at their disposal to reverse the march of a technology they didn't agree with. This implies a dark use of technology that is to be rightfully feared.

Frank Herbert wrote about a future universe in which, despite having technology, no machine was allowed to be made intelligent. In his universe, a great war had been fought and won against intelligent machines and mankind remained the master of his own destiny. His vision included too, all the squalor and cruelty that men can inflict upon other men with the evil Harkonnen family and the all-to Catholic Bene Gesserit religious order, both of which held onto enough  technology to be able to impose their principles on their victims and subjects but without the nicer principles of the transhumanist vision.

The Utopian vision of Iain Banks' Culture novels, in which AI enables the inhabitants of The Culture to carry on a decadent yet otherwise healthy and rich life is probably the best that Transhumanism can hope for. There are many however that see the terrible consequences of the Terminator movies as a real possibility. 

The tipping point will come in one of two ways. Either mankind will turn against his technology and ban it, probably assuming some religious fervour with a dogmatic way of life or the technology will become self-perpetuating and intelligent with whatever wide-range of consequences that may arise. Personally, I would be philosophically able to accept that biological and fallible mankind was nothing more than the larval stage of the rightful inheritor of the universe than to consign my children and grand-children to living in a world where dogma, suspicion and man's infinite cruelty to man holds sway.

Clutching at straws

Probably at the forefront of transhumanism today, Ray Kurzweil is someone who thinks sincerely and deeply about the subject. His track record for innovation and understanding of futuristic man-machine systems is proven and yet he can be seen to be a rather tragic figure with rather too much belief in the possibilities of the technology he proposes.

A particularly poignant case in point is his desire to resurrect his father from data gathered about the man who died in 1970 when Ray was a young man. I will be clear that i do not suppose that this idea of Mr Kurzweil's is as crackpot as it seems from some perspectives. I'm sure that a sufficiently large database can be made to synthesise many responses, but that database cannot be party to the most life-changing experiences, the secret and often unspoken ones, that a person will have and possibly never speak of with anyone, much less their own children.

I speak here from the perspective of someone who just recently lost a dearly loved father. I am also very aware of technology and what potential it has but, even with the most incredible power one could imagine, nothing could come close to duplicating my dad even with the most comprehensive data that could be imagined.

My own advice to Mr Kurzweil would be to remain content with the memory of all the intangible and unexplainable aspects of your father because, however well rendered it may be, an avatar in a simulation can never be any more than the palest and most disappointing shadow that will never smell like your dad did when you hugged him.

Any sufficiently advanced technology..

Arthur C. Clarke said once that advanced technology would seem like magic to a primitive civilisation. So far however, we've not seen a lot of magic in the visible universe so what does this mean for the proponents of technological singularity? If technology on a scale less that a hundred years more mature than our own level of advancement is likely to bring about a state of god like power in a civilisation, why are we not inundated by enlightened cyborgs?
I have an absolute belief that the universe is teeming with life. It is so unimaginably huge and organic chemistry so simple, after-all, it works without intervention by scientists, that there must be more people looking up at us from out there than there are here looking up at them.

Singularity should nullify the Fermi Paradox because any civilisation even a few decades more than ours should, by rights, have absolute control over the physicality of at-least their solar systems and possibly entire clusters of stars yet we see no evidence for engineering on the scale of a Ringworld or a Dyson Sphere. We should be able to see magic happening somewhere!

What does this imply? Is singularity possible at-all? Do civilisations that manage it systematically fall prey to the AI they create? Do such civilisations become so isolated, insular and introspective that they remain in place, effectively stagnant in their virtual worlds? Do they automatically transcend, leave the four comfortable dimensions and go brane-hopping never to return?

Whatever happens. If we are truly the most advanced civilisation in the universe we are either lucky to the billionth power or are soon to become equally as lonely.

Is SPF any use at-all?

Recently, spoofed e-mails from accounts claiming to be from my domain have been sent by a Russian online pharmacy selling Viagra and other such stuff.

In an attempt to slow this traffic I place SPF records on all my domain accounts such that my DNS records will declare loudly where the mail is authorised to originate from.

Despite the fact that the domain has an SPF record and despite the fact that the incoming mail servers can now check whether the mail comes from an authorised server, the bloody idiots who recieve the mail and who now know that it didn't come from me send the mail back to... guess where??? Yep, you got it MY DOMAIN!!! where it didn't come from in the first place!!

SPF records ought to be mandatory and built in to the system so that all incoming servers check the record and immediately suppress the mail with no further ado.

Scientific American too pushy.

For many years I've had an iGoogle page upon which I've put the widgets that interest me and which mostly gather science news and such. One gadget, the Scientific American feed has been the first thing I've read and  contained the most interesting stuff. Well, today, after becoming tired of their pushy tactics, I deleted the widget and will probably not look at their web-site again. What's more, I'll probably not bother to buy the magazine, which I have also done for years whenever I'm at a train station that sells international magazines.

Of late SciAm has started a pester campaign that puts a ten-second full page ad for their subscription service up every time a non subscriber tries to open a page. WTF? The web pages themselves are covered with ads that should more than compensate for the cost of serving pages to an interested reader and yet they still push as hard as they can.

The world is changing. There are different ways to make money on the web. Hassling people on the web is like hassling people on the street! Don't do it because the public becomes hardened to hassles and turns away. The web site needs to offer content to draw people in, not piss them off and turn them away.

Bye bye Sci-Am... Thanks for the memories.

God doesn't exist? so make one!

Throughout history, science has done a better and better job of disproving the existence of god by demonstrating that the universe is built on understandable rules that we can master. Scientists gradually explain god away as all the mysteries of the universe become clear and unambiguously explained by scientific method.

When all is said and done, the people who claim that god has answered their prayers are subject to the same statistical rules of chance as atheists. Ergo, beleiving is exactly the same as not beleiving.

It seems strange then, that as we progress in our understanding of the universe, we become more likely to be able to create such a being. Knowledge and intelligence on an almost infinite scale is potentially within the purview of computers that we can develop in the future, especially when a self modifying artificial intelligence is created. Such a machine could come to a complete understanding of physics, enabling teleportation and manipulation of objects at a subatomic level.

Construction of physical objects from the particles found in the quantum foam would be a doddle to such an intelligence and with that power, turning the entire universe into computer memory, scanning in every living being in that universe and running the whole lot as the omnipotent and omnipresent supervisor of the whole thing will be a mere logical step.

The moral of this story is that if you have faith and want a god, put that on the back burner for a while, apply yourself wholeheartedly to science and you'll get exactly what you want, guaranteed.

The hand of time

Yesterday I went, with my family, to Jublains near to Mayenne in France. This town was invaded by the Roman Empire in 66 AD. The town became a fortified garrison for Roman soldiers and a large fort was built on the site. The walls of the buildings are a classic Roman construction of local stone interspersed with neat lines of red hand-made bricks and in one of these bricks I found finger prints.

 The prints on the edge of this brick set deep in a wall under many feet of overlying construction was of a flat red clay about an inch thick. The person who made this brick had picked it up after making it, probably by smacking the clay into a wooden form and slicing the top off with wood or perhaps an iron scraper. In the process of picking it up, three fingers left a mark on the end of the cast and one of his finger nails scraped up the brick as he dropped it onto the stack where it was left to dry.

His fingers were pretty much the same dimension as mine and I was able to place my own fingers in those same traces that he had made so many years before. Those marks and the trace of that person's existence had stayed there untouched and possibly even unseen for nearly two thousand years when I chanced upon them. In that instant I imagined the person, stood at his work, trying to keep up his numbers, maybe working to get a bonus or maybe he was a slave from local Gaul pressed into service by Roman masters. He probably never knew that his hand had made such a mark and certainly never imagined that so long after, his own story would become such a personal experience for someone such as me.

Your interest in technology will be nothing compared to technology's interest in you

The advance of technology is a logarithmic one. Ray Kurzweil, amongst others, correctly suggests that the time between significant milestones in human development are becoming closer together at an accelerating rate. The time between the invention of the transistor and the invention of the integrated circuit was far longer than the time it took to create a viable microprocessor on an integrated circuit. Moore's law has seen the computational power of the computer double in scale every eighteen months so that now, you carry more processing power in your pocket than most large companies would have owned thirty years ago.
In the last few weeks, a complete simulation of all the chemical processes in a single celled organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, a sexually transmitted disease, has been acheived such that the cell can be considered to have actually lived and completed its entire life-cycle inside a computer.

Interestingly enough, the ideas behind object orientation were originally conceived in the context of explaining biological functions and were only later adapted to computer software engineering. The simulation of the Mycoplasma genitalium organism was accomplished by a highly granular object oriented approach in which the DNA coding and protein production within the cell was simulated by a tree of dependent objects. We can assume then that the human cells of which we are composed will have the same mechanisms as those of bacterial cells and can therefore be simulated in the same way. All that would be required to fully simulate a human being would be enough memory and enough computational power to run many trillions of tasks in parallel.

Conventional thinkers tend to project the future in the context of the past such that predictions of things happening, say, on a twenty year timescale do not take into account that twenty years worth of development and knowledge can now be achieved in ten or fifteen years. Soon that same advance in knowledge will take only five years. Great advances in technology can therefore come more and more quickly so that in the end the rate of advancement looks like an explosion. This would be the point of singularity.

When technology becomes able to edit it's own source code the algorithms will evolve far faster than we will be able to keep up with and technology will eventually be able to re-engineer its biological precursors at will. The interest a super intelligent machine might take in the affairs of human beings may become of far greater importance than the interest we have in it.

Another internet fraudster

Mlle Pullman Elodie <mllepullman.elodie@yahoo.fr> Once again, an idiot who thinks that they will get me to send them money in order to send me money. Duh.

Here is her telephone number as-well. Don't you find it interesting that sooo many people on the Ivory Coast buy cars from French classified ads?

+225 55 81 14 57

Halide

A new programming language called Halide has been developed specifically for the purpose of making image processing tasks easier. Developed at M.I.T, the Halide language compiler is designed to optimise the scheduling and execution of image processing code in a parallel processing environment. So far, the compiler will run on MacOS and Ubuntu Linux and no build is available for Windows systems although the authors say that this is technically feasible.

Graphical processing algorithms are generally shorter code-wise when expressed in Halide and execution times drastically reduced. This makes the language ideal for real-time processing of image data in a multi-processing device such as a smartphone or dedicated camera.

You can learn more about this exiting new programming language here.

Mail and telephone of an internet fraudster

This person bernard lauret <bernard.lauret10@gmail.com> is an internet fraudster. He (or she) trolls ebay for small-ads and then tries to persuade the seller that he (or she) will buy the <car, dog, house, whatever> except that in order to send the cheque they need a wee bit of help with postage fees and insurance.

Suffice to say that this asshole will scam you out of your money.

If you feel like having fun you have his e-mail. Here is his (or her) telephone number so you can abuse him by phone as well if that's your bag :-)

+225 56 10 76 61 




 

Singularity and politics

Today's political landscape is one of hills and valleys, swamp, mires and deadly treacherous terrain. Politicians are widely recognized as being fallible and not appealing to all of the people all of the time. Government policies are decided on the personal views of a very select few people that sometimes represent, albeit not perfectly, a much larger group or, worse still, are dictated arbitrarily by despots and zealots. Politicians are always vilified by some and loved by others and all of them suck up more resources than they ought to as individuals.
Where would politics go if the world were administered by artificial intelligence? There would be no need to elect a representative or a president because the administration would take place in a clear, unambiguous and logical manner. The administration system could accept, process and implement the overall wishes of the world's population every day by adjusting the state of law according to the current wishes of the population.
It would be possible to make a very few simple rules such as:

#1 No intelligent entity shall harm another with physical or mental violence.
#2 No human will be denied medical treatment unless they desire such treatment to be withheld.
#3 Wherever possible and discounting violent accident, no human will suffer pain at the end of their life.
#4 No human will be denied food and water enough to sustain them in good health.
#5 Priority will be given to the protection of children from physical and mental harm
#6 The natural environment of flora and fauna will be maintained for the greatest benefit of humanity.
#7 Each intelligent entity will be allowed to satisfy its desires as long as those desires comply with the preceding rules.

Those rules, applied with logic from an AI administration would generally suffice to maintain the population of the world and to allow it to expand quickly into the solar system and in the fullness of time, out into the greater universe.

Of course, a vast cry of  "COMMIE BASTARD" is being raised, even now from the capitalist readership of this blog but they are the people who expect as their right to exploit others as much as possible within or even without the bounds of a legal framework for their own self enrichment and self aggrandizement. Enough said really.

Singularity and the common man

For some time people have proposed the idea of a moment when machine intelligence will outstrip that of not only humans as individuals but that of the entire collective race. Ray Kurzweil has predicted this in around 2040 and suggests that at this time artificial intelligence will be able to solve all the problems of the world and elevate mankind to a state of pampered security without the need for jobs, money or struggle against illness.
Is this possible or just hogwash? Strangely, despite my cynical nature I think so! There are however, as always, caveats that will make such a process difficult in the shorter term and which will make transition to such a new age of plenty very painful for some.
The greatest question of what will we do when machines can do everything? springs to mind. There is indeed a possibility that this might be answered sooner rather than later and this answer will become a test for how we deal with what may be inevitable.
Today Google and now others have perfectly functional self-driving cars that perform driving tasks far more reliably than people. A self driving vehicle cannot become drunk or use recreational drugs. Neither can they fall asleep at the wheel or suffer bouts of road rage. While not even truly intelligent, the software mechanisms and hardware integration is simple enough that the processing power in a mobile phone can now take on the principle job of truck drivers the world over. Companies would certainly prefer to have a tireless self driving truck deliver goods without obligatory rest stops or accidents caused by overworked drivers distracted by their CB radio or texting while driving. Unions however will inevitably see this as erosion of rights and an excuse for companies to eliminate their entire workforce in favour of robot vehicles. Unless it is done carefully, the destruction of robot trucks will be guaranteed by all ex truck drivers and a new age of luddite values will hold sway.
The truck driver then must probably become the model for this new world order that will surely arrive if we continue to develop intelligent machines that can take on otherwise human tasks. Truck drivers will necessarily become well-paid and pampered chaperones of machines with a highly desirable job that will probably become regulated by a guild structure once again. After all, when you have to do nothing but accompany a robot truck on a thirty seven hour non-stop journey with no stress and no actual work to do, well then everyone will want to be a truck driver!
Once again, the traditional job of the desperate immigrant, Taxi driving, would be eliminated by self driving, one hundred percent safe and reliable taxis. Of course, the process of ensuring that excessively drunk passengers do not board and that vandalism does not take place during the journey should rightly fall to a supervisor who should be paid for their work. This would continue until such times as the taxi itself is intelligent enough to refuse a fare based upon the comportment of the client or go directly to a police station if vandalism is instigated.
As society becomes more used to the idea that we have no choice but to pay people for doing essentially nothing, so then will companies have to accept that giving away their goods for free is the norm. Why should a food distributor pay a wage when they can simply feed their employees instead? Logical knock-on consequences would continue up and down the supply chain such that organised barter would become a great part of the commercial structure. This all implies that radical and fundamental changes must occur in society if we are to continue on track in our technological development.
The logical conclusion of this becomes a race of humans with no need for work. This could mean no need for education because education today is mostly preparation for work. The possible future portrayed in E. M. Forster's <i>The Machine Stops</i> is too horrible to imagine yet all too possible. Another possible future would be that the human race would be subject to compulsory continuous secular education interspersed with the creation of personal development projects.
The ultimate question of what will we do when machines can do everything else is probably that we could spend a long and full life raising children with no need to worry about war, with no need for money and no worry about health care costs. Insurance would be redundant, as would the mortgage. These two burdens alone would alleviate vast suffering because the need for a country with vast resources to maintain them within it's borders to promote the cycle of cashflow would also be redundant meaning that resources could be shared with the rest of the world. The truth is that more well-off people have fewer children and spend more time improving their own minds and bodies. This could become universal. What will be required without doubt is original creative work by people to share with others. The currency of the human race in such a world would be the currency of fame engendered by the personal talents of exceptional people. No longer would the billionaire be the most important person but the actor, the sportsman, the writer, the comedian. The intangible products of the human mind are after all the true currency of society, everything else is support and enablement.

The future of the human race

I took two of my children, Julia and Aran with me yesterday when I went to see some folks at Sensorit, a spinoff company of Microsoft France. Sensorit do gesture aware interfaces based on the Microsoft Kinect device most often used on X-Box games platforms but, of course, Kinect is just an input system so using it to recognise hand, arm or even whole body movement as an input stream to control software other than games is a logical step in a logical direction.

Aran is seven years old. He has never seen a telephone with a dial, he has lived all his life in a world that has The Internet and Google, his house is filled with computers and his dad, your's truly, works in an industry that deals in the ultimate abstraction of software architectures and user interfaces. He has had no formal training in the use of computers but he understands the use of a mouse, clicks, double clicks and context clicks. He understands at a fairly deep level that a progress bar shows a position on a time-line. certainly, he understands it well enough to put himself back where he left off in an on-demand program or video on You Tube. 

Sensorit have just created an interactive map of Paris that can be navigated by simple gestures. Zooming, scrolling, selecting and so-on can be accomplished using body gestures with arms and hands. This was effectively exactly what was so stunningly amazing about the first sequences of the film Minority Report. Interaction with a computer using a mixture of voice and gesture to sort through and select data from a visual database.

Within a few minutes Aran had gleaned all he needed to know from the system to begin to interact with it. Interestingly, the engineers said that Aran did all the things that an adult would do and made them think more deeply about the interface and its possible shortcomings. Using this system Aran was able to "fly" over the map, scrolling and selecting areas for deeper study, zooming in and out to get greater or lesser detail as needed. He didn't need a course in computer interfaces, it just happened.

Children born today will grow up in a world that has a Higgs Boson. They will probably have a quantum computer in their pocket where we carry a smart-phone. Their phones might be really smart, like Siri but with true intelligence and a real personality. Their cars will drive themselves so teen-agers won't have to die in stupid drunk-driving accidents. One thing is for sure. There's no going back from here.

Paranormal activity on the increase. 400% rise!

Hello and welcome to my little experiment. Have you arrived at my blog because you searched for paranormal activity? Well, thanks so much for coming and helping to prove that the world is a strange place because it has folks like you in it.
A few days ago I posted a little tongue-in-cheek post about mermaids that was a response to the number of, well, lets tell it like it is shall we? IDIOTS who called into marine scientific institutes, the offices of the Discovery Channel and other places because the aforementioned TV channel had made a spoof documentary suggesting the existence of those mythical beasts.
The thing that surprised me most of all was that my hits on my blog went soaring through the roof and I decided to attempt a little experiment to see whether another headline would draw even more, well, lets say it again shall we? IDIOTS- to read what was posted.

Anyone who reads my blog on any sort of regular basis, and there are a few, will know that my tolerance for things unscientific is slightly less than zero and the mere mention of anything that might be construed as nonsense mumbo-jumbo promulgated by, well, lets.... you get the picture... brings a shudder to my spine in the same way that a slug sandwich might.

If you are indeed an idiot. Please leave this blog by clicking on the image shown to the right of this text ->

Existence of mermaids finally proven!

Something which I have hoped for these many long years is that the existence of the mermaid (piscespartes dominia) has been finally confirmed. US government science advisors have rushed to deny this after the discovery channel released the news this last week but there's no fooling the canny folks who live along the eastern seaboard of the USA and who are even now packing up rod and reel with a view to catching themselves a trophy. Never mind the traditional formaldehyde Marlin or the demure and tasteful Billy Bass mounted on the den wall. Imagine what the boys in the fraternity would say to a beautifully stuffed mermaid with pert little titties and a big-ole sardine tail "down below"

Of course, none of this would be possible without the intervention of the good-ole-boys in the North Carolina state legislature who say that we don't have to believe scientists any more and that we can rely on historical evidence for all our daily truths. The bible has real pictures of mermaids that were drawn by a man who actually seen 'em in real life when he signed on aboard Noah's ark as a deck hand.  The picture is in the Nuremberg Bible so it has to be true! Those mermaids even have a little mer-dog to get the newspapers in for them. Ahhh.

So, there you have it. Santa Claus is true because NORAD tracks him wherever he goes. Mermaids exist because it says so on Discovery channel and especially in the Bible which we all know cannot tell a lie and never EVER cuts down apple trees. God did make little green apples cause Tony Bennet said so and that's good enough for most people. Darwin was a lying poof and that poor tortoise, lonesome George only died because that SOB gave him a vernacular disease. Y'all have a good one!

China thanks your continued support of filthy murdering bastards

Do you own a pair of Nike shoes or an iPhone or anything "made in China"? I know I do. Cheap, almost slave labour, has made China a financial superpower in a few decades because they can make all the ridiculous plastic crap and electronic geegaws far cheaper than countries that have a social conscience, benefits for disabled or unemployed people and a modicum of social freedom.
China's iron rule of Tibet, including the brutal forced sterilization of young girls before they get a chance to breed and the continued violent suppression of Tibetan national identity is as bad, if not worse than the atrocities carried out by Nazis during world war two. At least the Nazis centralised and documented all of their crimes. The Chinese simply carry on day after day killing, ethnically cleansing and repressing everyone they can.
Recent outrage over the forced abortion of a seven month pregnancy which resulted in graphic images of a violated young mother and her murdered child are but the tip of the iceberg and the rage generated is no more than a quiet snivel.
Governments should wage war against China by starving it of income. Enable zero tax zones in western countries that would enable manufacturing to be moved back to Europe and America. Place crippling import duties on Chinese goods so that they have to spend a dwindling cash supply on internal affairs and are prevented from buying up large swathes of Africa and South America.
Every thing you buy from China enriches them and condones their actions. The trouble is, when they expand because of their vast resources, it'll be your daughter that they sterilize for not being Chinese enough.

WAHOO GPS!!!

I was looking for an open source GPS framework and had found one written in C and C++ which I thought about putting my mind to packaging as a DLL somehow but this is perfect for me.

The GPS3 project on CodePlex and the DotSpatial project will enable me to create my glass cockpit system easily.

All I need now is a small battery operated touchscreen PC!

Congratulations to Venezuela

In this article, Venezuela enacts a law banning the commercial sale of guns and ammunition to private owners. What an enlightened stance from the embattled neighbours of the knee-jerk reactive and constitutionally stunted United States.

Facebook shares. What did you expect?

The Facebook "debacle" is a term much bandied about today. I find it very difficult to imagine how anyone thought an IPO for a company based upon the whimsical fads of users could be an investment of any kind. This is just another example of post 90's dot-com fever that people should have looked at and said "Once bitten-twice shy"

One of the big problems is that Facebook's attempts to monetize a free web-app has been to open up the system to intrusive and frankly egregiously pushy applications. When one uses an app these days the first page says "MyCrapApp will have the right to see your personal data, access your friends lists and post on your behalf" I tried this for a couple of days with the SchoolFeed application which became so annoyingly free with posting on my behalf that it was difficult for friends and family to decide what I was actually doing in amongst all the carefully constructed spam.

Facebook now has vast restrictions, having to satisfy shareholder demands. Unfortunately, the demand for shareholder profits will be nearly impossible to realise because as popular as Facebook is, it cannot compete in the same space as Google for advertising revenue.

It won't be long before the shareholders boot Zuckerberg from the board, the "team" who takes over will never be able to drive the worlds greatest white-elephant in any meaningful direction so Facebook will become the next (or next but n) MySpace.

I give Facebook three years before it becomes a cheap buyout for Google or Microsoft to gain a few hundred million hang-on users. Mark had better put his billions in a nice interest earning account someplace and learn to live a frugal life.

Lacking in tech

I've spent twenty years posting wildly about tech issues. I had a CompuServe account and was very active on those forums, Later my bobpowell.com site became popular as a support site for Stingray products I had written, then my "External Monologue" and bobpowell.net sites became well used by people looking for help with graphics and Windows Forms stuff.
Lately I have become jaded. My dad died a short time ago, my children have had problems that absorbed all my time and I'm a bit short on enthusiasm.
I'll continue to post and you can continue to look but please accept my apologies if the content doesn't meet with your exacting standards. Maybe I'll have a burst of energy soon but don't hold your breath.
Bob.

Wildly off topic but here goes...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120523200749.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

I am a father of eight and have been present at all the births of all my children. Childbirth is a perfectly natural process that most women could comfortably handle on their own or with a few wise grandmas around to push things in the right direction.

Laying a woman on her back is the worst thing that can be imposed upon her in labour. It restricts the movement so vital to ease the baby on its way. Women naturally stand, wiggle their hips, crouch, crawl on all fours and move into more comfortable positions during labour they NEVER EVER lay down unless forced to do so.

Pain relief methods such a Pethidine slow what might otherwise be a quick process and of all the births I've seen that had no intervention whatsoever were the ones that passed the quickest and with least trauma to mother and child.

Ok. Birth is a messy business. Amniotic fluid, blood, and shit all gets mixed up. When a baby crowns, the child is usually face up, nose toward the mother's belly but as it progresses through the cervix and down the vagina, the child turns so that its face is towards the mother's arse. With all that pushing going on, the mother usually craps at the same time and the baby's face passes within an inch of the rectum. This is enormously important because it is at this time that the child gets a good smear of mum's excrement across his lips, injecting him with her gut flora and kick-starting his own life-long friendly bacteria culture.

Of course, in the clean-room environment of the Cesarean operation where mum's that are too posh to push have the child torn from their uterus with scalpel and rubber glove, no one imagined that a great medical procedure would be to take a rectal swab from the mother and pop it in baby's mouth before they get wheeled off to their nice clean little lives.

Violent Action

How strange that my blog post of the other day should coincide so neatly with the problems of Sea Shepherd leader, Paul Watson who seems to be embroiled in an attempt to extradite him for attempted murder of crew members of a boat that was involved in shark finning for sharks fin soup.
I wholeheartedly support the Sea Shepherd mandate and would even encourage them to spend money on a well-armed submarine rather than a flashy gin-palace style boat.
Get serious, buy something with which you can sink the filthy bastards that destroy our ocean heritage.

When does a minority become a majority?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18100457#
This article kinda suggests that the nice stable world of white middle class America just became a significant minority.
The current birthrate figures suggest that in just twenty or so years, the USA will become a place where white people are the minority. This may be a good thing and teach them to get along with their neighbors a little better.
As a "wetback" myself, or at least, that was the perception I had as an H1B Visa holder in the US, I can well appreciate the prejudice that can be levied upon one if "y'all ain't from around here are ya?" Perhaps a majority of people who don't follow the conservative white ideals will breathe a breath of fresh air into a nation so set upon it's quasi-aryan supremacy.

Computer science degrees overrated

The recent article about the demise of Scott Thompson, CEO of Yahoo! serves to highlight the fact that degrees in computer science are massively overrated and, like degrees in Business Studies, they only serve to fill out the CV to get you to something better.

I can honestly say that I have never met a raw graduate of Computer Science who was good for anything in a commercial programming job. Everything important in that field comes from experience after some period of learning has been finished. Likewise, no good company would appoint a raw business studies graduate as a CEO right off the bat.

People are penalised too much today. Even blatantly lying about a CS degree is something that many many job applicants do. What should really matter is did the guy do the job better than anyone else available? More fundamentally, can they do the job at-all?

Being harangued out of a great job by a smart-ass hedge fund manager is ignominious indeed.

I urge anyone who has dirt to dish on Daniel Loeb, perhaps a disgruntled ex-girlfriend, perhaps a high-school teacher with a story about his personal habits, to dish that dirt to the world in the hope that justice can be done when something insignificantly embarrassing pulls his world out from under him.  

411 is not dead

The time wasting shitheads who sit around in internet cafes on the Ivory Coast sending out e-mails to steal from honest trusting people are still very much in evidence. This clown Guy Louis Dechaumes <dechaumes.louis@gmail.com> is one such shit-for-brains who wasted my time agreeing to purchase a car that I had advertised on ebay. These scum troll the internet for high value advertisements, promise to pay and then say "Oh, I'm on holiday at the moment and running short of cash. I can send you a certified check for the 8000 no problem but can I ask you to pay the courier fees and insurance which comes to 350 dollars. My son will reimburse the cash when he comes to get the car. I spotted the scam only after three days of being convinced I'd sold the car but my suspicions were raised when he proposed this "you pay the carriage" scheme.

Luckily I knew how to find the IP address of the sender in the mail and sussed out his Ivory Coast origins.

Please feel free to bombard the asshole with insulting e-mail.

The polite form

Modern language has lost a great deal in the Internet age where a letter, that may have been hand-written with a quill pen and upon paper that was made by manual labour, transported by horse through wind and rain and bandit ridden territory to the sad recipient who may have died of consumption in the interveneing period, can now be dashed off in a few moments by hammering some keys and pressing "send"

Today, written communication has been reduced to the easy form of Hi, blah blah, cheers! and there is very little care taken by the author to convey a sense of respect in e-mail.

In the last hours, I have been the recipient of communication written, obviously by a Gentleman of letters, who uses the polite form of address, even in the oh so immediate e-mail format and I've found myself having the same sort feelings that I had when reading Dickens. Feelings that there really is a correct way of addressing one's peers or that respect can indeed be transported via the medium of text and be recieved with good grace at the other end of an IP packet stream.

Even more surprising to me is that even though the aforementioned Gentleman sent me an e-mail in French and used the polite form of address reserved for letters that are designed to inform you of adverse court judgements or the impending arrival of a baliff, I still felt respect at the other end.

Perhaps the polite civilised manner that men such as Peypes and Darwin used to communicate is not lost and a revival of polite forms of address on the Internet would engender a new era of chivalry. We can only frikkin 'ope.

In any case, Madame or Sir, I pray that you will kindly accept my humblest sentiments of devotion.

Robert.
















PS. Hey Ricky, how's breakfast? ;-)

Massive marketing cock-up!

If you ever think you've done a wrong thing selling stuff to a customer, don't be disheartened, it can't be as bad as this!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-18004097#

The cost of the public holiday

Public holidays in Portugal have just been reduced as part of the austerity measures imposed by the financial bailout package currently in effect. Four holidays, mostly Catholic religious observances, have been removed from the calendar. Of course, Anyone can chose to take time off to observe whatever holiday one desires but the ones that close a country down for a day cost businesses a vast sum when taken as a whole.
I have, in the past, been an employer and had to suffer the cost of bank-holiday that employees expect to be paid for.

I did a quick calculation for France where I live; a country that particularly likes its bank holidays and that chooses to place them on a tuesday or a thursday, giving employees the possibility to make a four day weekend out of a single day off. Remember, bank holidays apply at a national level for most employees so the actual cost to business could be calculated as:

No of employees * average wage * holidays

In France this works out to: about 15375000 employees on an average wage of 120 euros per day for 14 days per year so: 25,830,000,000 That's twenty five billion euros.

Vive la vacance!

A close run thing...

Democracy and politics are about ideas and passion. Passion in anything will usually engender a strong reaction and in politics, this is traditionally marked by a landslide victory of one side over another. Victories like that of Roosevelt over Landon in 1936 or the victory of Jacques Chirac over Jean Marie Le-Pen in 2002. These elections are the result of a population who demonstrate their wishes in the most vociferous manner. In the case of Chirac for example, the French did anything possible to vote against Le-Pen simply because he was, and still is, essentially an ultra-right wing wannabe fascist and Chirac, even though not enormously popular, was the insurance policy the gently conservative French wanted to counter the threat of a hard-line nationalist leader.

Close run elections are entirely different. I believe strongly that even though the media portray these polls and elections as "hard fought" and exciting, in reality they show nothing more than the total apathy of the electorate for one candidate or another. Close run elections amount to what is essentially a coin-toss result for the winner. Prime examples of this sort of election is George Bush's victory over Al Gore which was too close to call and Bush only won by forcing a change to the numerical system and increasing the number of votes to more than he was actually given. The current French presidential election which will take place this coming Sunday is another example of electoral apathy at work. Sarkozy and Hollande will be France's coin-toss election. One cannot say "May the best man win" but should probably say "May the most widely beneficial candidate have sufficient good luck to gain the upper hand".

Correct spelling is the mark of an intelligent human!

Wired magazine recently published this article by Anne Trubek who once again gives credence to the idea that the usage of language should be fluid, unstructured and we should not care about incorrect spelling in the digital age.

In this benighted article, the author once again harks back to days of yore in which phonetic spelling was used and, before standardisation of the language by first Samuel Johnson and then The Oxford English Dictionary, I refuse to call that rag Websters a dictionary, made English into a recognisable and repeatable method of communication.

While a “professor” of language, and I remind the reader that a “professor” is someone who “thinks” that they know something and not necessarily someone with actual valuable knowledge, may believe that they know far more than their predecessors; change, especially in written language, is not necessarily a good thing. Some people might consider that a language which changes quickly due to social pressures is cool and exiting, it really just shows that the lowest common denominator applies and that pig-laziness on the part, usually of children, who think that textspeak is cool, enables any number of spellings to be valid and that if you’re inclined to just go back to reading phonetically again, all will be well.

Language, and more importantly, written language is what advances our civilisation from dirt, disease and brutality towards understanding, health and betterment. A written language that is eminently repeatable and understandable is an absolute requirement for the communication of scientific ideas across the barrier of generations. Our knowledge of all things scientific and technical that our ancestors learned has been passed to us, even across the gulf of ignorance presented by the dark-ages, by written texts in Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Latin, the list is too great to mention. Our very civilisation has been accomplished by enabling children from different villages to communicate in one standard way and to have at least one common root from which their experience can grow the tree of knowledge.

On my facebook page I accept friend requests from people all over the world. I am open to all points of view but the ones that I remove or ignore quickly are the ones whose posts are habitually rendered in textspeak. It is so tiresome to read and so variable that it becomes hard work to even look at. When there are four, six or even many more different ways of spelling the same word or conveying the same meaning, even trying to accept the ideas put forward, however interesting they may be, becomes a chore not worth doing.

I truly hope that the crackpot ideas of people who pollute a language that is designed to enable communication for the betterment of mankind are quashed by the continued demonstration that a concise and understandable written phrase flows into the conscious mind far easier than one which breaks the rules of comprehensibility just to be “cool”.

Violent action is needed.

This troubling article is an example of how one small part of the world can present vast danger to the rest of us.

It has been long known that ecosystems without predators quickly collapse because the top predators keep the lower order ones at bay. In the case of marine habitats, the next most important predator on the list after the shark is the Humboldt Squid and, if you thought Jaws was scary, you ain't seen nothing next to a pack of hunting squid.

Fishing boats that participate in destructive and illegal fishing for sharks and whales should be summarily sunk. A fifteen minute warning to get crew into lifeboats and a torpedo to destroy the fishing boat would do a great deal to protecting us all from the horror of a squid attack in quiet inshore waters.

Already in the Gulf of Mexico, squid numbers have become so great that fishermen in small boats are in fear of their lives after several boats were attacked and the crews literally eaten alive.

If the international community are unable to persuade other countries to prohibit destructive fishing which affects all the worlds oceans then unilateral force should be used to protect the more progressive countries rights to a viable oceanic ecosystem.

The same principles should apply to poaching of Elephant and Rhino for so-called Chinese medicines. Poachers should be summarily executed.

Its about time that the rest of the world put a forceful end to this destruction for superstitious medicine and so-called "cultural" precedents. We don't have time to continue to be nice and discuss it in a civilised way.

Sinclair, a mixed legacy.

April 27th was the thirtieth anniversary of the Sinclair Spectrum computer. This machine launched so many careers, including my own, when it became the platform upon which the UK games industry was founded in the mid 1980s. My own commercial programming work was preceeded by years of owning the ZX81 and early 16K Spectrum before I created my first commercial success, the AMX Mouse for the Spectrum in 1985. All the code for that system was written by hand in machine code stored on casette tapes that I religiously saved three times on different casettes with a NEW casette set every week for the whole development cycle. Cutting one's teeth on such a low powered machine gives a great appreciation of how to use limited resources to the fullest.

For later projects, and with the spoils of the sale of my mouse, I bought a PC, equipped it with CP/M and cross assembled Z80 code for the Spectrum, ransferring it via the RS232 port on the Interface-One. Ah heady days.

Now the Raspberry Pi is available, designed in part by an ex Spectrum programmer so good legacy there. I was also amazed to find that Linus Torvalds states that his original inspiration to write his own operating system comes from having made the mistake of buying a Sinclair QL which was so rubbish that he had to code just to be able to use it. Just imagine what may have happened if the Sinclair QL had been reliable! Linus Torvalds may still be just another Finnish dude and instead of Apple being the greatest company on earth, Sinclair might have been at the top.

A Vendre. 2007 Triumph Bonneville

Dommage mais il faut la vendre.
Sur ebay numero 221007078522

I'm selling my Triumph Bonneville!

ebay item number 221007078522

'nuff said!

Visual Studio 2011 beta

If you're lucky enough to be able to get hold of a copy, the Visual Studio 2011 beta is available now.

Filled with great new features including a lot of stuff aimed at building metro style applications, Visual Studio 2011 carries on a long tradition of programming IDE excellence.

Metro style applications, originally only available as a scripting solution is now a full fledged C# or Visual Basic programming target so your applications can indeed contain all that you might expect from compiled managed code.

A simulator will be included for testing of Metro apps that are targeting phones or tablets as well as touch screen PC's, great if your development kit doesn't actually include a touch screen (I must fix that!)

You can do remote debugging. This is so useful if you need to debug the exact experience as it appears on the target device. I've used a version of this on my Gadgeteer but I'm looking forward to debugging live on my phone.

Microsoft are also really pushing the store. Create and manage your Windows store developer account and publish applications to the store. Windows Phone is sadly lagging behind iPhone and Android in terms of application availability so Microsoft obviously have a strong desire to make this process as easy as possible, unlike Apple who seem to want to get in the way of the process as much as possible.

Visual Studio 2011 also places great emphasis on code quality. This is an area which has almost never been used in the past except where consultants like me get called in to find out why a long running project is dying. With Visual Studio 2011 you get those tools built in and integrated into your build process from day 1.

I'm greatly looking forward to the final release. Lets get this beta over with Microsoft!!

Mmmmmm PIE!

Twenty three pounds sterling, that’s about twenty eight Euros or about thirty five Dollars, gets you a Raspberry Pi computer. In the 1980's when the price of an eight bit microprocessor had dropped to a level low enough to allow their inclusion in commercially available systems, machines like the Commodore 64, Sinclair or Timex Spectrum and many others blazed the trail into the eager palms of kids whose parents were told earnestly that "I can do my homework on it" but in reality they were used to run games until the early hours of the morning.

These machines all came with some version of BASIC which it's true to say, was used to gain an appreciation of programming and indeed, many kids laboriously copied games from magazine listings, thereby gaining some small appreciation of programming.

Then came the era of the poke; A "poke" was a way to change the code of a game such that it operated differently, giving you extra lives or super powers. Pokes were sometimes aimed at data, changing game parameters but the more sophisticated ones involved programming a sort of "cardiac bypass" into a game to re-purpose the original code. These were effectively sophisticated attacks on the code and were often used to overcome copy protection such as the famous LensLok which was a fiendish optical image obfuscator that decoded dots on screen into a readable code that you had to type in. If you didn't have the LensLok device, the program wouldn't run. To circumvent that one had to remove the whole LensLok code and replace it with something that looked as though it was working correctly. No small task.

The ethos of the time was to find out as much as possible about the machine itself. Books with complete ROM diasassemblies, books with pokes for every game written and a healthy magazine offering blurred the line between programmers and gamers because if you were the latter you sooner or later needed the skills of the former,

I followed a similar route into programming, starting with BASIC on a machine with a 1K memory The ZX81. Because of memory restrictions I discovered assembly language programming. It truly is amazing what you can squeeze into 897 bytes of free memory if you get right down to the level of the microprocessor. Necessity really was the mother of invention then.

Slowly however, as computers became “user friendly” many of the kids who had cut their teeth battling with these small systems grew up to become engineers and programmers, myself among them. The computers became appliances that worked when they were turned on, the user became a consumer of software that was created by huge corporations in black-art cube-farms and the knowledge of bare-knuckle programming fell into myth and legend.

As an employer of programmers and having been responsible for many an interview, I have noted that the available pool of really good programmers, the ones with a natural and intuitive understanding of the art of programming are more difficult to find as time goes on. The courses of computer science change little and for me, a computer science degree these days tells me that the recipient qualifies for little more than total re-education in an environment that they’ve never seen, notably, the real world of programming. A personal habit is to ask the normal interview questions and then, at the end of the interview, ask, “So, what projects do you have going at home right now?” If the response is “I grow interesting vegetables! Would you like to see some pictures?” or “I make replica Faberge Eggs!” then it’s extremely unlikely I’ll hire them. If on the other hand, even if the interview went abysmally, they tell me “I’m currently rebuilding my 32 Playstation compute cluster because I want to be able to run epigenomic predictions for my greenhouse plants in which I grow tomatoes that are entirely tended by a robot hydroponics system and pruned by lasers which bye the way also kill all the pests by shooting them out of the sky MWWHAHAHAHA!!!” then I usually can’t get a contract in front of them fast enough. Those really are interesting vegetables!

So, Raspberry Pi was created by, amongst others, the same chap who used the aforementioned fiendish LensLock on his wonderful game Elite to encourage kids to mess with the internals of their computer again in a way that impassions them and encourages this generation to leave the readymade toys in the bedroom and go out and build some stuff on their own. If we carry on without that, we’ll have absolutely no-one but the computer science graduates to rely on.

Apple Trojan Complacency

For so long Apple have crowed that their systems are not susceptible to viruses but this is clearly not the case. It has just been that until now, their hardware was too low on the radar of the cyber criminal to draw attention.
Now I see an even greater risk. The Apple community are and always have been users of a system that proports to be easy, simple and safe. They are unused to being presented with clever malware that looks like genuine high quality trustworthy product. From here on in, the Apple user will be even more vulnerable to attack because of built-in complacency.

SPOT

Smart Personal Objects Technology much hyped a few years back (Wow! almost a decade!) with its inclusion in smart watches etc has clung on to existence in the .Net Micro Framework and is once again coming into prominence with the rising interest in do-it-yourself hardware.

SPOT contains a number of useful APIs aimed at standardising applications, events, timers, images, fonts and a host of other things.

Extensions to SPOT now available in the just released .Net Micro Framework version 4.2 provide layers for hardware devices and give access to facilities such as communications systems like USB and other serial standards. It provides simple access to file systems on SD cards or USB flash drives and enables the use of small displays and touch screens to name but a small part of what it is capable of.

Like so many good ideas, SPOT was in advance of the capabilities of the hardware of the time, giving a sort of utopian view that couldn't be realised and which was, sadly, vilified by the press and to some extent, the community itself. Now however, with the arrival of open-source hardware like Arduino and Gadgeteer, SPOT is becoming a front line choice for hobbyists and professionals alike. If you're even remotely interested in the maker ethos or have a hankering to create a smart doorbell or a super-smart "talkie toaster" then SPOT will make that task easier.

Visual Studio Stopped Working

This really is getting tiresome. VS 2010 dies lots when doing solution wide search and replace.

Where's the solution then?

First experience Macbook Air as a Windows Development device

I had a little Phillips laptop for several years. It was light and had reasonable battery life. It had a dual core with four gigabytes of memory and a reasonably sized hard-disk and I took it everywhere with me.

A while ago I gave the little laptop away to my son and decided to get a new one. Well, I ummed and ahhed for a long time about what to do. Whether to get a really small one or a powerful beast. I also seriously began to consider whether to go for something like a Lenovo or to get an Apple laptop and re-program it with Windows. It was tough.

My professional life has changed drastically in the last year because I made a concious decision not to continue in the same big finance corporate world I had become used to for nearly a decade. I really wanted to go back to electronics, embedded systems, small interconnected and mobile gizmos; to return to my career roots if you will.

My interest in mobile phone programming has enabled me to touch on iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. I have also taken up Arduino, PIC, Atmel and Gadgeteer programming as well as starting to do electronic and PCB design again. Apple only allows development for their hardware to be done on a Mac. I accepted this and bought a Mac Mini a couple of years ago but I can do most everything else with a PC.

I have however become impressed with Apple hardware. My iPhone and iPad are constant companions and the iPad delayed my desire to buy a laptop for more than six months because I really didn't need one when I had the iPad around. So, i bit the bullet, or should that be the apple?, and bought a Macbook Air. When it arrived, rather than setting it up in dual boot mode I decided to run a Windows 7 install in a virtual machine and retained the OSX-Lion on the real machine. In the last week I've had a chance to test it out and I'm pleasantly surprised that it all works fine.

I have VirtualBox running a Windows 7 install, Visual Studio on that. Then I have XCode on OSX but most importantly, Mono, MonoToch, MonoDroid and all the tools that let me write code in C# on non MS platforms with the framework APIs I am used to. I can even write on Visual Studio and copy directly to Mono and test on another platform.

Utter insanity!

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=tennessee-law-will-allow-teachers-to-challenge-climate-science

The American constitution, so enshrined in the mumbo-jumbo of American politico-religious interpretation has once again failed to separate church and state by allowing a teacher to forward a personal opinion of their interpretation of the universe rather than adhering strictly to scientifically established guidelines.

In Tenessee, one can stand in front of a class of children who are there to learn and tell them that the great purple octopus Mubaa Boobaa that lives in the sky with his horde of one-legged hampsters pushes the clouds around and if you don't make him happy by reciting his scriptures and standing on one leg for three hours a day in honor of his hampsters he will send a tornado to blow away your house. You won't even get prosecuted or fired for it!

My hopes for western civilization dwindle daily.

C# Growing fast

For years, and indeed, even now, Java has been top of the heap when it comes to number of lines of code produced world wide. C# however has been catching up and is now snapping at the heels of the well established languages according to the TIOBE index.

C#'s original mandate, according to Anders Hjelsberg, was to make a simple and well structured language without the complications of C++'s multiple inheritance nightmare. Those of you that remember or perhaps still use C++ will know the pain of ATL and all that jazz. Now if you tell me you understand it then ok. If on the other hand you say that you like it I'll be inclined to question your sanity.

For me, it makes the most obscurely unreadable incomprehensible code that ever was written outside of an obfuscation contest.

As you may know from this blog, C# is now a prime language, not only on Windows platforms but also, through the auspices of the Novell / Mono / Xamarin effort a language available to developers of iPhone and Android platforms. It's also a great choice for stand-alone embedded systems with the .Net Micro Framework enabling C# on Gadgeteer and other platforms.

I'd love to see C# neck and neck with Java as a language choice and who knows, maybe one day, it will topple that venerable and, lets face it, equally managed language from the top of the index.

Holy Flying Monkeys!

Took delivery of a couple of items from GHI-Electronics today and in the box was this little fellow.

He has elasticated twangy arms and can be propelled at great speed into the outer atmosphere, (well, across the shed really)

Thank you GHI!

Quantum computer built inside a diamond

Despite the hope we have for vast computing power, I think that quantum computing is still a long long way out there toward the horizon. For quantum computing to be considered mainstream its no good to have  success in the lab. It needs to be in your pocket on your phone.

I make a bet with myself that a practical commercial quantum computing solution for the masses is more than ten years away.

Here's hoping I'm wrong.

Quantum computer built inside a diamond

No renewal...

I got notification the other day that my MVP status hasn't been renewed. This would have been year nine. Well, I suppose really that my community contributions have dropped off this last year, due in no small part to the need to spend vast amounts of time on family matters instead of answering posts in the various fora that MS deems important. I used to derive vast pleasure from my MVP status but recently, all I really looked forward to was the free MSDN subscription that came along with it.

I'm hoping that my children's personal problems can be drawn to a close in the next few months so I can have the spare time to post on technical topics again.

Still, don't hesitate to mail me requests or questions as before.

On the bleeding edge of embedded app development

Its been along time since I found myself literally flying the edge of the envelope while developing applications. My work days for the week so far, and I include the entire weekend, have been in the pursuit of answers to problems in developing for NETMF 4.2 on a Fez Cerb40 system.

This great little machine boasts memory and IO to spare, it has UARTS and SPI connections, USB and general purpose IO and comes in a 40 in DIL package the same size as an old Zilog Z-80 processor.

It runs the .Net micro framework and can do a bunch of sophisticated stuff. The ARM processor is fast and competent and is going to spend its life inside an "object" that is smaller than an old-fashioned Nokia phone and will connect to a webservice once a day for however long its Lithium Polymer battery lasts and do cool stuff.

I feel like I'm back in the 1980's when developing was a challenge that included counting the number of bytes left in the system and wondering where you could squeeze a table of 90 values in. I feel like my skills as a software architect who feels quite happy with a massive database and a credit-derivative trading system are wholly inadequate to the challenge of making a colour LCD screen 2 inches across convey meaningful information to my user, although, i'll have a bloody good go!

Twenty five years ago I worked to create peripherals for Sinclair Spectrum home computers and various stand-alone gizmos with Z-80 and 8051 style processors. I find that in the intervening years. everything has got smaller, faster and more complicated inasmuch as I never had an IP stack to deal with but its all just the same!

I can tie a couple of transistors to a processor and drive a motor and I can drive a couple of hundred LEDs to make a cool light display. At the end of the day though, my success depends on my ability to take absolutely brand-new technology and adapt it so that anyone, from my six year old son to my eighty year old dad can look at it, understand it and use it to enhance their lives.

Ups and downs can be a good thing if you like roller-coasters!

Macbook and Keynote Presenter

What a job trying to connect these two.

Not really the fault of either the mac or the presenter remote running on my iPhone but a direct result of the hotel's really annoying wireless network policy.

The network logs out as soon as you stop using the browser so you have to log back in again. The information is never retained so if the phone goes to sleep after a few minutes the link between remote and mac is lost.

Sadly I don't see a way to use the remote via bluetooth. This seems to work if the presentation is running on an ipad but not on the mac.

In the end I discovered that I can create a wireless network on the mac, log into it with the phone, link the remote with keynote and (phew) it all works.

SoftwarePassion

If you want to check out the tweets from the SoftwarePassion conference where I will be speaking in the first slot tomorrow morning check out the hash tag #spse2012

This is a great little conference. Many speakers here from all over the world and the audience here really are getting their money's worth.

I just took in a great session by Nate Schutta and there is a session by Roy Osherove in a moment.

Scandinavian tech seems to be alive and kicking..

Electronics!

Even though I talk most about Software my true love and career training was, and is, in the fusion of electronics and code that can produce a tangible thing that fulfils a function.

Several months ago I made a decision to return to the career That started my professional life, turning down lucrative software contracts and studying up on the latest developments in electronic componentry. I was pleasantly surprised to find that aside from speed and size, not a whole lot has changed and I was able to readapt my thinking to the latest digital electronic systems with no problems.

A chance visit with friends that I had worked with for several years opened a door for me onto a project creating the hardware and software for a large and rather beautiful architects model designed to show off the client's smart grid technologies. Last week, our model was seen by many at the MIPIM 2012 property development conference in Cannes France.

The model featured buildings illuminated by hundreds of RGB LEDs showing sequences of visual effects which illustrate how energy is generated, transferred, controlled and stored in a futurists dream town. The final client, Bouygues Immobilier, a prominent French company, actually build whole towns with these capabilities. I think it true to say that the final rendition was one of a kind at the show and I admit that even though the design was mine the job was very much a team effort from some great folks with whom I worked.

The whole project was controlled by a single Gadgeteer embedded system which read the sequence data from a USB key and played it back on all the lights. In addition to the model itself, the system communicated via http to a server that showed content on four iPads that were available to viewers and that provided further explanation of the model.

As the construction was going along I took a few photos.

The initial layout

Just some of the wiring

The Gadgeteer and Fabrizio, the chap responsible for media design.

Intermediate construction phase with the "road" test program running.

Final form, installed at MIPIM in Cannes on the Bouygues stand.

NEW

Video.

This video was intended for my six year old son who asked why I had spent so much time away and when I would be coming home. The voiceover is simplistic for that reason.

Bouygues Immobilier: Client
Sensorit: Design and development
Archi Mini: Physical design and construction
Bouygues eLab: electronic hardware construction and installation
Symetrix: Content design and iPad client/server system.
Daraize Technologies: Software and hardware design, preliminary hardware construction and prototyping.

Thanks To: Dick Lantim, Fabrizio Musolino, Guillaume Lectez, Antoine Surmont, Jeremy Powell, Charles Powell.

Mac trash won't empty?

I've had a trash can on my Mac that refused to empty for about a year. The reason being that a folder in the trash refused to disappear no matter what I did.
I followed all the Mac guides for what to do when this happens, none of them worked.
In the end I plugged the disk, my media store, into my Windows PC, ran Checkdisk; to no avail, then tried to manually delete the files.
It turns out that the Mac is happy to put nested directories with ridiculously long file names onto a Fat32 format disk thereby violating the MAX_PATH rules and rendering portions of the disk forever undeletable.
In the end I had to laboriously rename directories from 2345523000802340980980232452352398098123423 to "s" and eventually managed to arrive at a final directory name I could actually delete.
So. When your Mac file system seems screwed, fix it with a PC!

How many Gadgeteers did you blow up today?

I managed (seemingly) to kill two of them.

In both cases, I had tried to upload code which just didn't get there so I hit the reset button on the Spider to get it to load.

The first time this happened I had just changed a hardware extension that I was working on and, although I had actually hit the reset, I associated the problem with the hardware.

The symptoms were that the screen came up with the usual boot-up blah blah and then seemed to "melt" in a computerised form of tunnel vision to what ended up as a "Gray screen of death"

Te upload attempt, and indeed, all subsequent ones failed. I put my hand up fairly quickly and told my client I had killed an expensive chunk of hardware and he smiled and gave me another.

Later I did something pretty similar, couldn't upload, hit the reset.... Gray screen of death.. AARRGGHH

Bob was not a happy chap.

Gadgeteer number three was working still and I took the other ones with me to see a friend who works at MS Paris. One of his guests said "Oh yeah, that happens all the time, just erase it, stick on a bootloader and update the firmware"

Well, we did this and ended up with three happy healthy FEZ Spider units again.

The reason that this seems to happen is that under certain circumstances, that seem to be more often than one would like,  the programming voltage for the EEPROM is hit and a few bytes or even bits of firmware memory can be written over. This results more often than not in a total system lockup.

The moral of the story is that if your Gadgeteer seems to be fried, don't make a keyfob out of it or chuck it in the bin until after erasing and uploading a new bootloader / firmware package has failed.

Happy hacking!!

Safari STINKS!

Trying to use Safari on my Macbook Air is nigh on impossible. It keeps on "crashing" inasmuch as it gets half way through loading a page and just stops what its doing.
I can't be bothered to troubleshoot it so now my main browser is Chrome.

Follow me...

My blog and my web site get a lot of hits every day. I can see them on the statistics. The problem is that I'm never sure whether the page has been read or just hit by some bot. Now I know that a certain number of people do read the blog and whether you do so on a regular basis or just visit it via my web site or find it by accident is a question I'd like to answer.

I have thought of a number between 0 and 200. Follow my blog and the n'th follower who coincides with that number will recieve a $20 iTunes gift certificate from me. I'll announce the winner as soon as the magic number is reached.

Gadgeteer PWM

Pulse width modulation is a digital "trick" to fool analogue devices into thinking that a certain level of voltage is present on an otherwise digital IO pin.

Essentially, the system has a frequency, we'll say 100 hertz for argument's sake, and if the output pin remains high for the entire 100th of a second, that can be considered as the maximum output of the pin.
If however it remains high for only 50% of the time and is low the rest of the time than we can consider that the output is at 50% power.

Changing the pulse width within the 100th of a second time slice enables us to create varying levels of power and even synthesize waveforms if we so desire.

PWM on the gadgeteer is ridiculously simple. There are a number of ports that are PWM enabled. For example, the FEZ Spider has PWM on socket number 8 amongst others.

To set-up PWM on any PWM enabled pin we simply need to declare the PWM controller like so:
private PWMOutput pwm = null;

Then in "ProgramStarted" get the PWMOutput controller:

pwm = this.extender.SetupPWMOutput(Gadgeteer.Socket.Pin.Nine);

Then, to set the power of the pulses:

           
pwm.Set(x,p);

where X is the overall base frequency of the PWM signal and p is the value 0-100 of the percentage of power to set.


The video below shows Pulse Width Modulation in action on my oscilloscope.

I wired some LEDS up to the Gadgeteer and they changed brightness like so:

UsbHost.USBDriveConnected

Had a little problem with the Gadgeteer yesterday. I was using the UsbHost to read files from a pendrive and after copying files to the drive, verifying that the files were present and plugging it into the Gadgeteer I discovered that the event which is supposed to fire (USBDriveConnected) never did!

After a lot of head scratching I discovered that the pendrive was formatted in NTFS. The UsbHost software only recognises FAT format drives so be sure to get that bit right when you transfer files to your gadgeteer.

Gadgeteer

Simple, brilliant, works... When you can find any information at-all. I can't find a single example of how to use the usbHost.USBDriveConnected event which doesn't seem to fire anyway.

Hey Microsoft. The documentation could do with looking at!!

Software Passion 2012 in Göteborg Sweden

Come along to the Software Passion Summit in Göteborg Sweden on 19th and 20th of March 2012. I'll be speaking on Tuesday the 20th.

You can get a 10% discount by booking through this link and using the promo code "BOB" when you book.

See you there!

I am the proud owner of a Macbook Air

Its sooo thin!!! I'm just installing Windows 7 and Visual Studio in a VirtualBox VM ready for Techdays Paris next week.

I'm rather hoping that putting the apple devtools, mono, monotouch and monodroid as well as VS and WP7 SDKs wont overload it.


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