Bessantomics
Conrad’s Little-Used BlogAtari ST Chaos Article Reprised
ST Format Issue 36
While testing out a new scanner (a Brother DCP 7030) I’ve finally got around to putting up one of my old magazine articles here on bessant.com. This particular article appeared in ST Format Issue 36 back in the heady days of July 1992. It shows how to create the Feigenbaum fractal using a simple epidemiology model. The science has stood the test of time, but I had to port the GFA Basic program code to Java to get it running on today’s computers. Ironically, these articles probably reached more people than the stuff I write now – ST Format was sold in all major UK newsagents and had a monthly circulation of over 65,000! There’s plenty more articles where this came from but unless there is huge interest I won’t be putting any more here for the simple reason that scanning them is a pain!
bangzo.com is alright
Googling for a book typically brings up thousands of hits from a myriad different booksellers, but for safety and convenience Amazon always seems like the sensible choice. How can you trust a place with a crazy name you never heard of? Recently though I was tempted by somewhere else, bangzo.com, which was offering the book I was after at nearly 20% off the Amazon price. That’s quite a saving when the book is question costs nearly £100. The transaction was smooth and the book duly arrived a couple of days later, so if anyone out there is thinking of using these guys here the punchline: they’re alright.
Google’s Browser: It’s Nearly There
As mentioned in a previous post, it would be great for netbooks if a single browser could do everything. Well, this got a step closer as Google added bookmark syncing to the Chrome browser (version 4, currently in beta). Farewell Firefox. I’d be delighted to ditch IE too, if only the Outlook web interface worked properly in Chrome – I’m just too reliant on message flagging!
Windows 7: It’s Expensive
Is anyone really going to upgrade to Windows 7 at current prices? I’ve got two laptops that could benefit from upgrading. Amazon are asking £130 per upgrade licence, but each laptop only cost £300 to buy new, with Windows pre-installed. Ebuyer have the OEM version for the more sensible price £64 but it probably technically illegal to buy that for upgrading purposes. Looks like I’ll have to wait and see if Microsoft reopen the Ultimate Steal to academic staff, or maybe I just buy a Mac …
Update: Despite suggestions to contrary on the web site, it seems that the Ultimate Steal is available to academic staff after all. From the terms and conditions: “This offer is good only to eligible students and staff who attend or are employed at an educational institution geographically located in the United Kingdom, Jersey, Guernsey or the Isle of Man.”. Windows 7 for £30 – that’s more like it!
Picassa 3.5 Rocks
Having recently returned from holiday in Chicago with far too many photos, I downloaded the latest version of Google’s Picassa to try and get them organised. I’m not disappointed, particularly thanks to two great features: mapping and face recognition.
Some of the photos were taken with an iPhone so have GPS data encoded within them – Picassa automatically marks the location of all these photos on an integrated instance of Google Maps so you can see where they are taken right down to the nearest few meters! Can’t remember the restaurant where you had that great meal captured in the photo? Now you know. Definitely a good reason to make sure your next camera has integrated GPS.
Face recognition does what you’d expect, but in an easier and better way that I’d thought possible. Picassa identifies faces within photos, asks you to name a few and then makes a guess at the remainder. It takes a bit of processing time but the overall accuracy is very good indeed. It gets a bit carried away in crowd scenes – it had a particularly good time with photos from Wimbledon – but thankfully you can decline the opportunity of naming everyone. In fact, most of the wrongly assigned faces tend to be these type, which have been extracted from tiny portions of an image and are there very low resolution.
So what’s the point of it all it all? Well, basically it facilitates better search. There’s no longer the need to edit filenames or image tags to describe the people in a photo or where it was taken. The only things you’d really need to add are verbs – I don’t see Picassa being able to automatically distinguish between, for example, dancing and eating any time soon. Also, you might want to tag non-human objects like vehicles, animals or plants. There are some irritations in Picassa 3.5, but overall it’s great, and it’s free!
Speed up your netbook
If you find yourself whinging about your slow netbook as I did in a previous post, here’s a couple of things that have helped get mine running quite a bit quicker (though still not quick enough!).
1. Get rid of any desktop search tools. I find Windows desktop search invaluable at work, where I have 10+ Gb of emails and other documents stored on the PC, so I installed it on my netbook. Big mistake. It seriously slows the thing down with its background indexing, and anyway it’s totally useless as I don’t store files on my netbook so have no need to search it.
2. Don’t use a system-hogging antivirus. A bit of detective work with Windows Task Manager showed that the antivirus software that I have to run to access work’s VPN was hogging 50% of the CPU a lot of the time, just doing nothing.
3. Stick to one browser – Chrome. This one’s harder said than done because no one browser has it all but it’s worth a try.
i for idiot?
Managed to get my hands on an iPhone 3GS during the past few days. It’s certainly good fun, especially with the built-in GPS, but ultimately I’ve decided to stick with my trusty old GSM mobile for the moment. It’s mainly due to the restrictions that Apple imposes on you. This starts right away – you can’t even use the iPhone without first connecting it to a computer running iTunes. Yes, despite being a mobile device with wifi and 3G support, you have to plug in a cable and install iTunes (a program despised by many, including myself) before you can do anything with it.
More frustrations await when you actually start using the thing. For example, the phone’s browser doesn’t support Flash. This hobbles sites like BBC News which use Flash for video, among other things. And don’t think about installing a Flash plugin or alternative browser – Apple doesn’t let you. Then there’s the multitasking, or rather lack of. You can download a free app to listen to last.fm, but you can’t listen to this while checking email or surfing the web. Similarly, you can’t run Skype in the background. These gripes, and plenty of others, can be found over at pleasefixtheiphone.com. Some of the flaws like the touch screen’s response being too vague to play can games can be forgiven – the iPhone was never supposed to be a Nintendo DS – but given the shocking price tag, it’s difficult to accept those flaws which are really of Apple’s own making.
It’s surprising to see media labelling the iPhone as the ultimate geek accessory – because everything is so locked down there really isn’t much here to occupy the average geek. But, it will appeal to people who like things that look good and cost a lot of money – maybe that’s the type of customer Apple is targeting.
Google Wave: First Impressions
Spent a good few hours today playing around in the Google Wave sandbox. First impressions are that there’s a lot of work to do before it goes live, but there is some really cool stuff there. As other people commented, Wave has to be a massive success if it’s to succeed at all. There is, at least at the moment, no proper integration with normal email (you can receive normal emails at a Wave address but messages go into a standard GMail account that has no meaningful integration with Wave). So, you’re going to have to get a lot of your contacts using Wave to make it worth your while logging in regularly.
So, is it so compelling and – more importantly – so easy to use that everyone will be signing up? Well, my concern is that there is a lot of new stuff in Wave and it takes time for developers to work out how to make new functionalities accessible in an intuitive way that people can use. At the moment a lot of things are not intuitive at all. For example, how would you guess that to make a Wave publicly accessible you need to add the contact public@a.gwave.com as a participant in the wave? Searching for waves involves special syntax complex enough to warrant a cheat sheet. It’s also tough to distinguish between robots and real people, for example Jan Kopanski – a robot that edits out curse words – could easily be confused with Jan Kopanski, a human being from Sheffield. How much of these usability issues get tidied up before release is going to be key to Wave’s success.
As for the cool stuff, things that jump out in the first hours of use are the obvious ones that we all saw in the demo. Dragging and dropping files – especially images – into Wave is great, but that’s a browser technology that’ll be coming to every web site, not just Wave. Being able to insert gadgets like an interactive map is also great. The tools for collaborative working are powerful and seeing other people typing and editing in real time editing is pretty neat, though it’s questionable how useful this is going to be. As with Google Wave as a whole, time (and more contacts to communicate with) will tell …
MSI Wind U100 Long Term Review
I’ve had an MSI Wind (with Windows XP) for about a year now. It’s my first and only netbook. Yesterday I spent seven hours on the train, but opted not to take the Wind with me – something that made me wonder whether the Wind is fit for purpose. Unfortunately, it isn’t, and here’s why:
Battery life: I’m only getting about 90 minutes, and mobile computing isn’t really mobile if you have to lug a charger around and seek out places to connect it. It seems that later U100s have double the battery capacity, but that adds size and weight.
It’s not powerful enough: Netbooks were never intended for running Flight Simulator or Matlab, and of course I don’t have anything like that installed. However, the Wind even seems too slow when doing basic things like web browsing and office applications.
The track pad is poor: I’m not a connoisseur of these things but this just doesn’t always respond the way it should.
So, what’s to be done? Well, hopefully Google’s Chrome OS might speed things up and maybe reduce power consumption. I’ll certainly try installing that when it comes out. But – and this is why Ubuntu isn’t already installed – I need a full featured word processor and presentation tool and they just don’t exist for Linux, yet …
Another C Bessant
Just found a mass spectrometry paper from 1998 of which one of the co-authors is a Christina Bessant from GSK. It’s almost tempting to boost my publication list by claiming this as one of my own!
