The Daily ACK

Worlde

2008-06-23T15:16:00.002+01:00

I must admit to being impressed by Wordle (via Orbiting Frog), enough that I had to give it a tip of the hat in passing...

My del.icio.us tag cloud as a Wordle...

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

It's a real pity that it's a Java applet and you can't use it as a component and build cool stuff on top of it. A clean room implementation as a web service using Python on Google's App Engine anyone?

Petrol crisis? What petrol crisis?

2008-06-16T22:48:00.011+01:00

In the wake of the current industrial action by tanker drivers, and more planned action at the middle of the week, some garages have been raising prices.

Here in the South West we're amoungst the worst affected by the strike, by now pretty much all of the filling stations in mid-Devon seem to have run out of diesel, while most of them have either run out, or are now rationing, unleaded petrol. There have also been some price rises by those forecourts that still have fuel left, although it's debatable with this to protect supply or simple profiteering. But even here in the South West 199.9 pence per litre, well above the average pre-strike price in Devon of 117.9 pence per litre, now being charged by one forecourt in Exwick is a little extreme.

CREDIT: BBC News

For my North American based audience that's £9.09 per Imperial gallon, or US$14.85 per US gallon at the current exchange rate of £1.00 to US$1.96.

So please stop complaining about your US$4 gallon of gas. Because its getting annoying, and even at the average pre-strike price, it looks awfully good to us over here. It's been a long time since anyone in the UK paid 54 pence per litre for petrol.

Despite reassurances by Downing Street to the contrary, I think a US$15 gallon of gas, with two more weeks of on again, off again, industrial action still planned, counts as a crisis. Don't you?

Update: Makes me wish for the good old days...

Find eSTAR on Facebook

2008-06-11T22:39:00.002+01:00

I just got round to creating a page for the eSTAR Project on Facebook. I've never really "got" Facebook pages, so I guess we'll see how it goes...

A giant like Google

2008-06-11T07:49:00.004+01:00

An iPod killer never arrived, and it seems unlikely to do so until some new technology comes along to kill it as dead as the Sony Walkman. Despite that the industry is already looking for an iPhone killer, but I think they're looking in the wrong direction. Because the iPhone is not a phone, it just happens to be able to make phone calls.

A few weeks ago Google announced (via Hack A Day) the winners of the first round of the Android Developer Challenge. Perhaps somewhat interestingly, only four of the winners chose to withhold details of their applications from public view. I'm not entirely sure what that says about the winners, but I'd be interested in finding out how many of the losers wanted their ideas kept secret if they'd won.

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats - Howard Aiken

This call was actually something I kicked around some ideas for, but in the end got side tracked into writing for the iPhone and playing with Arduinos. There are, after all, only so many hours in the day where you're not actually doing work you're paid to do.

However from the list of winners two applications stood out...

Jigsaw by Mikhail Ksenzov stood out because it's an application for something I do a lot. People with mobile phones taking pictures of the white board are pretty common during meetings.


Applying a geometric transform to the photograph

While I can't find a website for the application from the screen shots and description in the PDF it looks to scratch an itch I've been having for a while. It comes with edge detection, geometric transformation and image enhancements pre-canned to help you capture that vital architecture diagram. If I end up getting a 3G iPhone I might get round to doing a clean room implementation, just for fun.

I've actually done what BreadCrumbz does without the automation, or the sharing, or the mobile phone come to that. I'm not alone, if you go to the directions page for Liverpool ARI you'll see that the text is annotated with links through to pictures of useful landmarks [1, 2, 3] enroute. So while it's not an original idea, it looks to be a good implementation of a good idea. Which is probably better for them in the long run, they're helping people do stuff they already want to do rather than trying to convince them to do new stuff. The second one is always harder than the first.

Of course what stands out for you depends on what you do, I'm fairly sure an application to take pictures of white boards doesn't have a mass market appeal, you have to be a geek like me...

What's the point? Well the winners were applications that you'd find on a smart phone. But the iPhone isn't a smart phone, it's an ultra-portable that can make phone calls. Google Android has the potential to unseat the iPhone, if that's the market they push it towards, but Google has to make a decision. Whether to go for the smart phone market, or to go for the iPhone. Of course, maybe smart phones are just about to become as dead as the Sony Walkman? They were never a good compromise ergonomically speaking anyway. Maybe the iPhone killed them?

The 3G iPhone

2008-06-10T09:41:00.007+01:00

Well we've all known it was coming, and that it was 3G. Engadget are hands-on with the new iPhone...

CREDIT: Engadget

However despite the hype surrounding the new phone, Read/Write Web injects a healthy dose of realisim by noting that all Apple is doing is playing catch up. While Dean Bubly points out that the 2MP camera was obsolete on the previous model, let alone this years model. It's a point I can certainly sympathise with, as I no longer own a digital camera. With a 5MP camera on my current phone, why would I have to?

My biggest problem with the old iPhone was Bluetooth, or rather the lack of proper Bluetooth support for anything other than the Headset Profile. Unlike the US, where Bluetooth really hasn't got a lot of market penetration, Bluetooth is everywhere here in the UK. Most, actually thinking about it, all of the devices I carry around with me (apart from my iPod touch) come with Bluetooth and unlike the States we're never suffered from the "crippled Bluetooth" problem. The new iPhone claims to come with Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR. However, whether this means that we finally have proper Bluetooth support remains to be seen.

On the down side, at least in the US, the "novel" at home activation via iTunes has gone the way of all things, and activation is in-store only. I doubt they're going to get away with that here in the UK, almost nobody I know buys their phones in a bricks-and-mortar store. I'm sure some people do, there wouldn't be as many mobile phone stores if they didn't, but everyone I know orders their handset online and it arrives the next day via courier. Worryingly however, if you go to the Apple website, only O2 and Carphone Warehouse are listed as places you can get a new iPhone.

On the up side, the iPhone is heavily subsidised here in the UK and will be free (via TechCrunch UK) from O2 on tariffs above £45 per month. The tariffs themselves, and here our friends across the pond must remember that in the UK you're not billed for incoming calls and text messages, are actually quite competitive.

Over the last few years we've been fighting an ongoing rear-guard action against longer contracts here in the UK, and regrettably, the iPhone might be the final nail in the coffin for traditional 12 month contracts. Although I'll note that O2 didn't quite have the guts to try and push the 24 month contracts that are standard with AT&T in the US. Unsurprisingly perhaps, I doubt anyone would buy the handset at all at that point, a longer contract would be far more off putting that anything else they could do apart from charging for it in the first place.

The only remaining problem? How do I hide the purchase from my wife?

The WWDC'08 keynote

2008-06-09T16:55:00.013+01:00

Unlike the January keynotes I tend not to live blog the WWDC. So if you're looking for up to the minute coverage you should head over to Engadget, Gizmodo, Macworld, Macrumors or ArsTechnica, all of whom have live coverage of tonight's keynote...

Update: A big list (via Robert Scoble) of places to get live coverage of the keynote, including a live audio stream, although that already seems to be buckling under the load with just under an hour to go before the keynote begins.

Update: As predicted, we have a new 3G iPhone.

Update: The keynote in 60 seconds from Mahalo Daily, or the full keynote from Apple.

Where everybody knows your name...

2008-06-09T13:36:00.009+01:00

Sense Networks emerged from stealth mode earlier today with a press release announcing both themselves and their products. It shows that even behind the most boring press releases some very cool technology can be lurking.

I wouldn't have taken a second look at the company based on the rather dry press release, but fortuntely they took the time last week to talk to Brady Forrest over on the O'Reilly Radar, who in turn took the time to talks about Sense Networks and CitySense. They also got some coverage from TechCrunch as well, but you'd expect that. TechCrunch covers everybody...

CREDIT: Sense Networks

CitySense shows you how active locations are (top) and which ones are abnormally active (bottom) in real time.
This startup is interesting. A big problem for location-aware startup companies is that they need location data. Normally they try and get this from their users, but most of the time their applications aren't really that useful until they get a critical mass of users. But getting a critical mass of users without having any a useful application is almost impossible. It's a classic Catch-22...

Sense Networks on the other had has been able to obtain data from taxi cabs, and it uses the origin and destination data from those taxi journeys to model the city. Then on top of this initial data they can then add in their user data, in accordance with a reassuringly strict privacy policy. Users get immediate benefits from the application, as Sense Networks have found that they can get a fairly good picture of the ebb and flow of city life just using the data from the taxi journeys, and that means it is that much easier to gather a critical mass of users to make sure their application takes off...

The immediate worry is that initially at least, reliant as they are on data from taxis, the application will model a specific demographic rather than showing a true representation of how the city functions. However that might be my European perspective getting in the way. The way a US city works, even a faux European city such as New York or Boston, is very different to the way a UK or European city works. Over here they might be better off relying on data from local buses rather than on taxis.

However that aside, I've seen a couple of attempts at solving similar, but actually less ambitious, problems. They've more or less all failed due to the "critical number of users" problem. But to get off the ground Sense Networks doesn't need a critical number of users, they can answer the question "Where is everybody?" without them. With them they hope to be able to answer the question "Where is everybody like me?", that's impressive stuff...

Of course as well as the current Blackberry application, Citysense is coming soon to the iPhone. But I guess that's only to be expected?

Update: As predicted, we have a new 3G iPhone.

Google Earth in a Browser

2008-05-28T17:54:00.011+01:00

Google Earth, meet the browser...

Unfortunately, for now at least, the browser plug-in is Windows only. While I've been promised that Mac OSX and Linux versions are coming soon, I'm really hoping that OSX support isn't limited to Firefox. For once, I'd like to see a Safari support out of the gate.

Update: Brady Forrest has a good overview over on the O'Reilly Radar, while Dann Catt is poking around the internals over on Geobloggers.

Bomb blast in Exeter

2008-05-22T16:14:00.009+01:00

A 12:50 BST today a bomb went off in Exeter city centre. Around forty minutes afterwards, at 13:29 BST, my wife emailed me here in Italy to tell me about the blast. The news started showing up a few minutes later, at 13:44 BST and 13:55 BST, as the story was picked up by the local and national BBC news sites. My tweet hit Twitter about 15 minutes after one BBC tweet and about an hour ahead of the other.

Taken at 15:22 BST by the Princesshay Webcam
At 14:12 BST the Exeter press office sent out a University wide email to inform people that there had been an explosion in the city, and that media reports suggested it was caused by an explosive device, but that there is no reason to suggest that the University was at risk.

Around the same time news stores started to appear as far afield as Plymouth and Turkey. The first pictures started to arrive around 13:40 BST, and by 14:55 BST there were twenty nine stories on Google News Search, reporting that there had been three blasts and that parts of the city had been evacuated including the Princesshay centre, Beford Sqare, High Street, Queen Street and Paris Street.

I'd received a second email from my wife at 14:42 BST suggesting that the current theory was that the blast had been caused by a man with a nail bomb trying to commit suicide about ten minutes before I saw the Reuters story suggesting the same thing.

By this point it had become clear that nobody other than the man that had set off the explosion had been injured in the incident and that although the possibility of other devices in the area could not be ruled out, there probably wasn't going to be any, and I could breathe again.

As happened with the London bombings in 2005 it is obvious that there have been fundamental changes in the way that news propagates since 2001. Although in fairness to the BBC, my wife tells me that she found out about the explosion from the local news more or less at the same time as someone who'd been in the city centre rang the office next door to tell them about the blast. Although following that, most additional information they heard came from friends and family on the ground, rather from the mainstream news sites.

I'd expect that over the next few hours, just like the 2005 blasts, I'll also be getting most of my news from non-mainstream sources. However unlike the 2005 bombing this, unless it turns out that the initial information is very wrong, is a local story and that means that, unlike a story of national interest, any follow up by the main stream press will be sporadic at best. They'll probably not just be the best news source, they might be the only news source available.

Update: Not quite a local story then, as it now appears there was some sort of Islamic connection. I'm getting very tired of the word "radicalised" being bandied about by the media...

Update: Amateur footage of the aftermath...

Three and the spam problem

2008-05-21T22:15:00.005+01:00

So if you've been keeping up you'll know I have one of Three's new HSDPA USB modems on loan for review, and that I'm also currently out in Italy.

After sorting out some teething troubles, the SIM card I have didn't come pre-activated for international roaming since it's a trial account, I've been using it fairly heavily. There is actually good coverage out here in Trieste, better in fact than I've seen in the UK in the past. Transfer speeds are pretty good, it's only noticeably slower than WiFi when you hit something like Google Maps which is heavy with AJAX and dynamic content.

I have stumbled across one problem though. Interestingly, it looks like the email I'm sending when connected through the dongle is getting black holed by the SpamCop, SORBS and NJABL lists.

Looking at the SpamCop entry for the pool address I was using it has been listed 17 times for a total of 69.4 days in the last 71 days. Most the other IP addresses in the same block have also been listed. In other words, it looks like a lot of Three's dynamic IP pool is listed as a source of spam.

That's bad news. Certainly anyone who sent me email that got flagged as coming from an IP address which is on one, or in this case more than one, real-time blackhole list stands a poor chance of me ever actually seeing the message unless they're on my mail client's white list. Since my white list basically consists of my boss and my wife, and not necessarily in that order, it's unlikely that will help them that much.

Of course I can work round the problem by connecting to my work's VPN, which means that to the world it'll look just as though I'm sitting back at my desk in Exeter. However, not everyone has that option. While black listing addresses in dynamic IP pools isn't entirely without controversy, it's fairly common practice. It looks like Three needs to clean house...

Unemployed in Greenland

2008-05-19T11:03:00.000+01:00

I travel a lot, anyone that sticks around here for any length of time knows that, and if you're also following my tweets you'll know I'm current in Italy.

Despite this, most of the traveling I do is actually trans-Atlantic. I'm a regular on the LHR to SFO and LAX routes and have spent more time than I care to recall watching "Godthab", the sole point of interest for at least a thousand miles, slowly move across the in-flight tracking display on the seatback video screen.

Vizzini: And you... Do you want me to send you back to where you were? Unemployed in Greenland! - The Princess Bride (1987)

I might do the Atlantic run anything from three to five times a year. This year, barring emergencies, I'll have watched Godthab slide across the screen another eight times before the year draws to a close. That's a lot of time unemployed over Greenland.

Except that I'm not, unemployed that is, Paul Graham talks about avoiding distractions and, at least for now, thirty thousand feet over Greenland is one of the few places in the world with no distractions.

Despite the fact that I spend most of my time watching in-flight movies, sometimes the same movie back-to-back several times in a row, when the boredom finally sets in properly, I spend my time thinking. Which is what I'm paid to do after all, but with all the distractions, have very little time for these days.

Short haul flights just don't offer the same opportunity for boredom, and then after you arrive on the ground you have less opportunity for more boredom.

If you're eight or ten hours out of your own normal time zone people seem to reduce the amount of irrelevant stuff they send your way. If you get email, its generally urgent, and they stop phoning you almost entirely. This doesn't happen if you've taken a short hop out of GMT and into CET. For some reason people think that you should be holding up your normal work load on top of whatever all day meeting you're squirreled away in this time.

Meetings, under any sensible definition of the word, aren't work. However they do take up as much time as real work, if not more. I definitely count most meetings as a distraction from getting work done. As well as traveling too much, I go to too many meetings. I'd really like to restrict the meetings I go to down to those that get stuff done, and hopefully the meeting I'm sitting in now will count as one of those.

Distractions are easy to come by, for instance I just spent twenty minutes writing this blog post, mainly because I want to tell people about my growing obsession with Godthab. That, and in-flight tracking, was what I was thinking about on the short haul flights that got me here after all.

Three and (not mobile) broadband?

2008-05-15T15:09:00.006+01:00

I was interested to spot (via 3mobilebuzz) that Three is thinking about rolling out a line of home routers which, instead of connecting you to the Internet via a land line ADSL connection, instead provide your home broadband via their 3G network.

CREDIT: Electricpig

To be clear, we're not talking about a femtocell, which uses your existing landline broadband to provide a cell base station, and allows networks to extend their coverage indoors, or other places where their coverage is limited or just plain unavailable. In fact what we're talking about here is exactly the opposite of a femtocell. Such a device would have its own SIM card, and then share its 3G conneciton to the Internet over a local wired and wireless network.

This is interesting, and not an idea I've come across before. Of course, with only spotty coverage on any of the networks in the out of the way village I live in, such a device isn't going to be on my shopping list. I'd be much better off with a femtocell, and when they finally (if ever) come onto the market I'll be the first in line, no matter which of the UK networks are offering it. However as someone that does drop off grid in some weird and wonderful places from time to time, I can see the attraction of this anti-femtocell.

Of course if you have a 3G dongle, you can already share your internet connection with other devices fairly easily, at least you can if you have a Mac, I'll not speak for Windows. But it's really nice to see this wrapped in a box for ease of use...

MS WorldWide Telescope for Mac?

2008-05-13T13:57:00.012+01:00

Earlier this morning I spotted (via Twitter) that Microsoft's World Wide Telescope had finally been released...

After wading through their flash based website to get to the download page I found out that the "Mac version" is a version that runs under Windows in Boot Camp. Which isn't exactly a Mac version at all, a bit of false advertising there I think...

At which point I was really interested to see Roy Williams quoted as saying,

...a beautiful platform for explaining and getting people excited about astronomy, and I think the professional astronomers will come to use it as well - Roy Williams

While it is more common in the US, I don't think I know a single British astronomer that owns a Windows box outside of the VO community. In fact someone else here at Exeter said that Roy's quote caused them an "...ironic chuckle". Which is pretty much how WWT has been received. Nobody here can try it because nobody has a Windows machine, we either run Linux or OSX.

Since the release this morning I've seen conflicting reports about WWT. The Register, which admittedly isn't generally acknowledged to be particularly pro-Microsoft, just couldn't get it to work while Stefan Geens over on Ogle Earth liked it a lot. So your milage may vary, but mine won't. It'll stay firmly at zero. I don't own a Windows machine, and I'm unlikely to go through the pain of installing Windows on my Mac to try it out...

Update: Reports of problems under Vista...

Update: Looks like I'm not the only one a bit underwhelmed by the "Mac version" of WWT.

SAMP is not Plastic

2008-05-08T15:44:00.003+01:00

Despite not being an official standard the Plastic protocol is one of the more obvious success stories of the Virtual Observatory effort. While it had its flaws, Plastic was easy to implement, and was quickly adopted as the lingua franca for client-side tools to talk to each other.

However in the run up to the Trieste meeting the draft SAMP standard has been released into the wild for comments. SAMP, that's Simple Application Messaging Protocol, is the official successor to the grassroots Plastic standard and shares a lot of common influences and a fair number of the developers.

Over the last few days I've put together a first cut at a prototype SAMP Hub, which will probably eventually after a lot more polishing become one of the reference implementations for the standard, along with some testbed clients.

In the past I've posted about various Plastic and Google related hacks, so its perhaps unsurprising that the first post about SAMP is Google related, and still involves a bit of so called tupperware. To prove to myself that the prototype Hub is actually (sort of) working I've put together a Plastic to SAMP gateway, and a SAMP facade application for Google Sky. After all, I can't go to an IVOA meeting without some sort of gee whiz demo, can I?

The death of the desktop, the end of the Internet?

2008-05-05T04:51:00.001+01:00

With the publication of his new book, "The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It", Johnathan Zittrain has started a debate amoungst the great and the good. People suddenly seem to be getting worried that gadgets are killing the Internet and that the iPhone might murder the web. He argues that today's technological market is dominated by two contrasting business models: the generative and the non-generative. The first model, general purpose computers, allow third parties to build upon and share through them. The second, non-generative model, is more restricted, with appliances that can only be modified by the vendor. He is very much afraid that the second model, where we are locked in by vendors is coming to predominate.

Well first of all I think he's just plain wrong, you only have to look at appliances like the Linksys NSLU2 or even the iPhone, which is oddly enough seems to be being held up as the poster child for vendor lock in, to see that we aren't being locked in by these devices at all. Or at least, some of us aren't. I think he's right in one respect, I think we're entering a period where the number of people that can hack on the devices we use to talk to the network is going to become smaller.

I'm not worried, like Peter Semmelhack I'm old enough to remember how it was before desktop computers came along. However unlike Peter I'm more philisophical about the passing of the desktop computer. I'm surprised he isn't because from my perspective he's one of the people that are storming the barricades. If the desktop dies, it'll be because of the open source hardware movement, and people like him...

Which is why I argued that we're entering a period of change, it's not that we're being locked into devices, it's that the people with the skills to hack on the devices are changing.

Out of the existing infrastructure, the idea of network neutrality is the important thing to hang onto. I'm far more worried about the possible loss of that, than I am about information silos or Facebook.

With open hardware like the Arduino arriving we've been given a new tool. In the same way the arrival of the desktop computer changed everything, the growing availability of open source hardware will do it again. Peter should drink some of his own Kool-Aid.

The Web as we know it today might already be dying, and that may be no bad thing. Because you have to remember that the Web isn't the Internet. The Internet existed before the Web and it'll be around a long time afterwards. This too, shall pass...

In its place I think we're looking at the arrival of something much more interesting, a pervasive information architecture. The New York Times (via Slashdot) carried an article recently talking about embedded devices, but there is an important distinction to be drawn between these and ubiquitous computing, where you have a pervasive architecture of computing devices. Between independent gadgets responding to simple environmental conditions, and a pervasive information architecture shared across a number of ubiquitous computing devices.

Compared to a real ubiquitous computing we're at the banging the rocks together stage

A big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere...and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys. - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

but that's no bad thing either, projects like Quickies from MIT, while still awkward, show the potential of moving our computing off the desktop and embedding it into the real world. It's an exciting time to be alive...

When the web came along and changed everything, I was really surprised that I was going to get to live through such a change. After all the desktop computer had only come along a few years before, it had changed everything, and while my first computer was a PDP-11 I was a bit too young to really appreciate what had happened at the time. Now I get to live through yet another huge change in the way the world works, people like Chris Anderson are quietly making it happen. If you haven't been following along Chris has been quietly scratching his itch and building autonomous UAV.

This wouldn't have been possible a couple of years ago, going beyond a crude prototype with hardware was hard. Even getting to the prototype stage was hard. Now it's the next big thing...

The fact that you have to go out and learn some electronics to take part in the next big thing isn't such a big deal. You're supposed to like learning new things. Go buy a soldering iron and stop worrying about information silos so much...

Mobile Broadband via India

2008-04-25T13:49:00.012+01:00

If you've been following along, you'll know that I currently have one of Three's new HSDPA USB modems on loan for review, and up till now I've been having problems getting it to work under OSX Tiger on my Intel Macbook, although I did get it working under Leopard on my PPC iMac without a hitch.

Well today I had a call from Three's technical support team, and from the sounds of things I was talking to the same Bangalore based team as you'd normally end up talking to if you'd managed to fight your way through the front line call centre people and got a call back from a real technical support person. I was pleasantly surprised, the agent at the end of the phone rapidly ramped their level of technical support from "...and have you tried plugging it into a different USB port?" to talking about the Kernel protection faults and driver conflicts.

The short story is that I now have a working USB modem, and am a happy geek with a new toy. The long story is, well, longer...

Now configured and connected to the Internet
It turns out that I having the configuration problems Aaron Heath was having, but with my own unique spin on things. The initial network driver configuration was indeed failing, because I had turned on the "Require password to unlock each secure system preference" option under the security options in my System Preferences. This meant that Three's proprietary connection software didn't actually have the permissions it needed to add or configure the new network interfaces. We actually accidentally stumbled across this during the tech support call when I plugged the dongle into the laptop while I had the Network Preference pane open and unlocked and it automatically enabled the HUAWEI Mobile device. From there we more or less followed Aaron's walkthrough to manually configure the network interface...

...and it shows up in the normal modem menu
The modem now shows up under the normal Mac drop down for such things, and I can connect to the Internet using it without a hitch from my Intel Macbook using the standard Mac tools. However, and perhaps somewhat tellingly, I still can't use the proprietary Mobile Connect application included with the dongle. It crashes, a bit further forward this time, but still with a Kernel Protection Failure...

The Mobile Connect application still doesn't work though?
Of course this doesn't really bother me, I'd rather use the device using the default tools anyway. However, without the Mobile Connect application, I do need a new way to monitor my bandwidth usage. I might not be paying for my packets while I have the dongle, but I'd like to be able to report back at the end of my trial with how much it would have cost had I actually had to pay for things. Especially since I'm off to Trieste in a couple of weeks and will be using the dongle to roam onto Three's Italian partner network, which could get interesting price wise.

It was surprisingly hard to find a simple, free, application that would just monitor my total bytes up and down on a specific network interface, until I stumbled across the oddly named SurplusMeter, which does exactly what I need, monitor ongoing usage against a preset bandwidth allowance.

Annoyingly there isn't any way of getting rid of the mounted volume on the dongle.
Which leaves me with my final annoyance, every time you plug in the dongle it mounts the partition with the driver software on it. This was actually rather nice the first time I plugged the stick into the computer, but now it just leaves me with an extra mounted volume cluttering up an already over full desktop. I'm not going to muck around with it right now, but after I've tested the dongle, and I'm back from Trieste, I might have a play around with Disk Utility and see if I can stop it doing that and still have access to the modem itself.

Anyway, as it turns out, this post is brought to you via mobile broadband and Three's dongle. I'd forgotten to plug my ethernet cable back into the laptop after taking the screen shots for the post....

Three's dongle and OSX

2008-04-17T14:42:00.012+01:00

Well it's been a week since I received one of Three's new HSDPA USB dongles on loan for review. They're probably regretting sending it to me...

Because this isn't a review, and it doesn't look like I'll be giving one. After a week in my company the dongle is still sitting in its box on the shelf. I still haven't managed to get it to work with my Intel Macbook which, despite claims of support, seems to be due to problems with the connection software and OSX Tiger.

Interestingly I have tried the dongle with my old PowerPC iMac, which is the only machine I have on my desk right now running Leopard, and unlike my laptop, which is still running Tiger, it works without any problems...

On first connection Three's software creates a HUAWEI Mobile network device, and oddly two more unconfigured devices; DIAG and PCUI
Not that my desktop was in need of mobile broadband, but the dongle does connect to the Three network successfully, creating a HUAWEI Mobile network device which, despite my previous complaints, does actually show up in the normal modem drop down menu. So it looks like there is no need to touch the proprietary connection software after your first connection to the network...

Having seen the software actually working now it looks to me as if, under Tiger, the problem is that it's not correctly updating the network devices list the first time it attempts to use the device.

In summary, if you're running OSX Tiger I'd advise steering clear of Three's new mobile broadband dongle because there seems to be some serious software problems. However if you're running OSX Leopard, or Windows come to that, it's likely you'll be okay.

However as I am running Tiger, unless I can resolve the driver problems, I'm pretty much at a dead end. As always of course, you mileage may vary...

Update: From the screen shot it looks like it is possible to get 3's dongle working under Tiger. Milage, as always, does seem to vary...

Update: After manually configuring the network interfaces, the dongle is now working.

KML as a standard?

2008-04-15T10:46:00.007+01:00

Google has given up control of the newborn they acquired when they bought Keyhole back in 2004. The Open Geospatial Consortium has just officially accepted KML as a standard.

The upcoming IVOA interop meeting in Trieste next month will also have a KML session, where we're going to discuss KML from the astronomy and VO side. I'd like to think that this is the start of the push to adopt KML as an 'official' standard inside the IVOA. Maybe we can sue for partial custody and it can visit us every second weekend and on major holidays?

The mobile web, still born?

2008-04-15T08:55:00.012+01:00

Back in 2005 Russell Beattie said,

If someone's using a PC to demo the next big thing, then it's not the next big thing...

He no long seems to believe that and announced today (via Read/Write Web) that he's calling it quits on his startup Mowser which joins the deadpool today. I'm not surprised. I firmly believe in his statement, but I've always disagreed with his assumption that the next big thing is mobile browsing.

I've argued before that the reason that the iPhone is so successful in the mobile browser market is that it isn't a phone. It isn't competing against the rest of the smart phone market because it's not a phone, it's an internet device, that happens to be able to make phone calls.

When it comes down to it mobile phones aren't about features, they're about ergonomics. That pretty much rules out being able to browse the web, people will make quick dashes, raids, for information. But spending time browsing?

The next big thing isn't going to be on a desktop, desktops are pretty much dead tech except for specialised uses, but the next big thing also isn't going to be the web. The last big thing was the web, it isn't going to be the next thing as well, making it mobile isn't big enough.

The next big thing is ubiquitous computing, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise...

Mobile Broadband?

2008-04-10T14:56:00.006+01:00

I was recently offered on loan one of the new HSDPA USB sticks from the UK network operator Three under a similar deal, which is I promise to write about it, to the Skypephone I had on loan from them at the tail end of last year. The stick arrived this morning...

I'm off to the IVOA Interop Meeting in Trieste next month, and Three are one of the few mobile operators with decent roaming rates, at least if you're in a country covered by one of Three's sister networks which are: Austria, Australia, Denmark, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy or Sweden. Which I will be, so it's all rather well timed...

Opening the box you find a USB stick, a cable and a SIM card. You have to insert the SIM card into the stick, and the stick into your laptop. The hardware setup therefore isn't that hard. I'm on a Mac and plugging the stick into my Macbook made the stick mount a partition with the driver software in it, double click to install and theoretically we're good to go...

The initial bad news is that the connection software doesn't use the default OSX utilities. The modem doesn't show up in the normal Internet Connect application, nor does it turn up in the modem status pull-down menu in the menu bar along with my Bluetooth and wired modems. What it does do is tread heavily over my root file system and install various bits and pieces onto the disk. It also installs a proprietary MobileConnect.app into my root Applications folder. Which doesn't make me that happy. None the less we're good to go...

Except that it doesn't work, firing up the proprietary connection software it finds the dongle without a problem, and I appear to have signal. Hitting connect I'm asked for my admin user name (why does it do that?) and then... connection failed.

There are interesting things going on in my system log file, but the application itself doesn't seem to create its own logs so its difficult to tell what's happening. But what seems to happen when you hit connect is that the SetNetworkConfig call crashes due to Kernel protection failure. In other words, bad things happen.

Which is where I am now, I'm about to email technical support with my crash dump and I'll let you know how I get on when they get back to me...

In the mean time you should probably head off and read the interesting BBC News article on why these dongles are so important to Three and why, after initially being a strong supporter of walled gardens, like most people they realised that these are not really a good thing...

Update: Works under Leopard, but not under Tiger?

Update: After manually configuring the network interfaces, the dongle is now working.

Galileo wheeltrack

2008-04-09T10:05:00.002+01:00

Just stumbled across this video, on CrunchGear, of the Galileo wheeltrack demo'd at the Robobusiness 2008 conference which started today in Pittsburgh. It was cool enough that I just had to pass it along...

Google App Engine

2008-04-08T12:41:00.017+01:00

Over the last couple of weeks there have been rumours running around that Google would be launching something to directly compete with Amazon's AWS suite, and embed themselves even further into the Cloud. Sure enough, while I was asleep, Google announced a preview release of Google App Engine at Campfire One.

But what Google has done is take a totally different approach to Amazon. The Google App Engine is basically a platform for producing and deploying (robust and scalable) webservices, where as Amazon's offering is a more pick and mix affair with storage (S3) and compute (EC2) and databases (SimpleDB) being offered as components rather than being integrated into a single platform.

However, one of the reasons why Amazon's S3 storage service has taken off so rapidly is the fact that it can be viewed as a component, and startups (and much larger firms) can use it transparently. So long as you wrap the service sensibly, if Amazon went bust tomorrow (unlikely) or the service became unavailable or unreliable (slightly more likely, but still unlikely) you wouldn't have to rewrite your entire code base. You buy a whole bunch of servers, assuming you can afford it, rewrite the low level library that handles storage, and you're set. You still maintain control.

Google isn't offering as much control as Amazon, if you build your business on Google's platform you're relying on Google to support your business. It's an interesting choice from Google's point of view, and it'll be interesting to see whether people will bet on Google. It looks like a sure bet, but if I was investing a lot of money into a business I must admit that it would probably make me rather nervous to leave so much control in the hands of another company who of course have their own objectives.

It seems very clear that, unlike Amazon's EC2, the App Engine doesn't have the potential (at least in its current incarnation) to be a general computing platform, it seems to be specifically built to be request driven, and that's okay.

Google's choice of Python as its runtime is probably fairly predictable, when you work for Google you have to use one of the four allowed languages, at least for deployable code, those being C++, Java, Python or JavaScript. Of the four Python is the obvious choice...

While I'm not a Python person, my language of choice to get things done is Perl, due to circumstance I've actually had to write a bunch of Python before. So while I'm not a guru, I can get things done in Python, abet slowly, all the while muttering that I'd get it done faster if I was writing in Perl. So I've put myself into the wait list for a slot in the preview release. I'll let you know if get accepted before they open the doors properly, I guess it'll take a while though...

However the release of Google's App Engine does mean that I'm even more annoyed than I already was, which was fairly, that my travel budget won't quite stretch to a trip out to San Francisco for Google I/O. I've already had to shelf plans to head out for Where 2.0 due to the budget squeeze here in the UK, although since I've already been out to ETech this year and will be heading to OSCON in July maybe I shouldn't complain? My a Dopplr trips list is still looking fairly full after all...

Update: There is some good discussion of Google's new App Engine by Richard MacManus over at Read/Write Web and by Brady Forrest on the O'Reilly Radar, and TechCrunch have had a go at building and launching an application using the new framework.

Update: Guido van Rossum talking about Google App Engine at it's release via Robert Scoble (and QIK) in two parts...

I'd have loved to have seen Larry Wall doing one of his typical off the wall talks at the launch of Google App Engine with a Perl run time. But I guess you can't have everything...

Update: Show your support for Perl as the next language runtime to be added to the App Engine. Right now (10/Apr) this is the second most highly ranked support request, just behind support for urllib and urllib2 interfaces in Python. Surely we can do better than that?

Update: Well, so much for the lock in arguement (via Daring Fireball and the O'Reilly Radar)

Twittering transient event messages

2008-04-05T22:28:00.006+01:00

After sitting through Jesse Robbins and Mikel Maron's talk on Disaster Tech at ETech last month in San Diego, and listening to them talk about Twitter, I finally 'got it'.

The currently supported protocols for VOEvent clients. Roughly divided into the push protocols; vanilla TCP and Jabber, and the pull protocols; RSS and KML. Twitter sits somewhere in between these two classes, as it can be used in both push mode via a mobile device, or in pull mode via the website.

So to go along with the TCP and RSS and KML event feeds, I'd like to point people at the new eSTAR Twitter feed. Right now the feed is only carrying automatically generated tweets alerting you to new transient events such as Gamma Ray Bursts, Microlensing Events and SNe Candidates. But I'm going to be plumbing Twitter into the heart of eSTAR over the next week or so, soon you'll be able to know not only when interesting things are happening, but also what telescopes are responding to those events, and what they're seeing. All in real time...

The April Internet

2008-04-01T10:08:00.006+01:00

Ever year the Internet is choked with April Fools jokes. Paging through my RSS feeds there are some obvious jokes and some less obvious jokes. There are things that might be jokes, but aren't. There are things that at first look might be true, but aren't, and there are some things that it would be handy if they were true. The troubling thing is it's getting hard to tell which is which, and that means that you have to take virtually everything with a pinch of salt. It's bad enough trying to avoid having your office being the one filled with balls (you have no idea how carefully I thought about the Google search to find that image) but every year I basically have to spend the day disbelieving every word people say to me...

...actually thinking about it, why was I trying to avoid having my office filled with balls?

UAV flights in Antarctica

2008-03-24T14:38:00.002Z

The British Antarctic Survey has just completed a series of test flights of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in Antarctica.

I know one of the people involved and this is a cool project, with a lot of potential for interesting bits of computer science and engineering, as well as climate science, to get done. I've been meaning to write it up properly since Phil's press release came out, but time is passing and it's been sitting in my edit queue the entire Easter weekend, so I'll just point you to the release about the test flights and leave it at that.

I've also been meaning to write up my own playing around, although only in software at the moment, where I've been investigating flocking and cooperative behaviors for autonomous UAVs, which is something that's come out of my work on autonomous agents for the eSTAR Project. Hopefully I'm going to break out the Arduino boards, and my soldering iron, and find the time to do some basic hardware demos soon. So perhaps I'll write it up then. Until then, go look at Phil's project, it's worth your while...