w o r d s

The big splash about Tata Motor’s ultra-cheap Nano ($2,500) all but buried another announcement from the Indian automaker at the Delhi auto show: they signed a $20M deal with MDI, a European start-up car maker working on commercializing cars that run on compressed air.

Of course, the cars don’t “run on air,” rather they use compressed air as an energy store, like batteries. Even the MDI website states that incorrectly, when they say that the the motor uses air as fuel. That, of course is complete nonsense. The source of the energy is either the power grid (via a stationary compressor), or a motor in the car (electric or combustion). They will also be able to recover energy from the moving vehicle during deceleration, much like some electric cars do.

So the potential for a positive environmental impact of this technology will be determined by

• its overall energy efficiency
• the ultimate source of the energy used
• the usefulness of the vehicle

They have been working on this for 14 years, and it’s not clear from the website how close they are to shipping the first models. But the investment from India should give them a big boost. Although I am skeptical that making cars and engines more complicated will make them more efficient, I certainly hope this works. This is very cool technology, and at the very least, it might help solve some specific problems, like cleaning up the air in big cities.

… computer product (according to PC World).

AOL mailed a billion of these annoying CDs to people, and I think I received most of them.

Whoopee - isn’t it amazing when stuff just works??!! Upgraded to the latest version of WordPress in a few Minutes. I also added the calendar plugin (see on the sidebar at the top). maybe that’ll be useful.

Boy - Bill Gates is so not funny! Even Jon Stewart has a hard time being funny with the Über-geek in the studio. “What does the F12 button do?” ??? This is a bit of an awkward interview, especially for Stewart, who is usually pretty good at it.

Last night we watched the DVD of Andy Kaufman doing the Midnight Special in 1981. I would give a lot to see Andy Kaufman have Gates on his show. Wow - that would have been just out of this world! Of course Kaufman died in 1984 - way too young - before the age of the geek.

The funniest moment with Gates was when he left without waiting for Stewarts queue …

Oops - apparently the harddrive fried on the server that hosts my website, this blog and my email server. So I was without email (at least non-work email) for two evenings, which was a bit disconcerting. And I was a bit nervous about the provider’s ability to restore all services and files and databases. I would hate to lose the information I gathered in this blog. I do have a local copy of the static website, but I have no backups of the databases. I should probably download a backup - just in case.

After 19 hours downtime, everything was back up and running. Phew! I am just glad I don’t run anything rally critical on this service. But then, you get what you pay for, and they are pretty cheap - $60/year.

For all you non-parents: Elmo is a red Sesame-Street “monster” that talks about himself in the third person. Toys based on this character have been extremely successful over the last 10 years. In 1996, a Wal-Mart clerk “suffered a pulled hamstring, injuries to his back, jaw and knee, a broken rib and a concussion” after he was trampled by 300 crazed shoppers because he held one of the remaining Elmo toys in the store (Wikipedia).

I remember hearing about Elmo Extreme last fall on the NPR news-quiz show “Wait-Wait, Don’t Tell Me” when the guy behind Elmo, the master puppeteer Kevin Clash plays their game called, “Shut up! Shut up! I’m going to cut your mike!” about Bill O’Reilly. Kevin is really funny, so I thought the brief reference to the Elmo Extreme was just a joke. (A bit of a sick joke, actually.)

Not so. Last fall the toy manufacturer Mattel came out with the 10th-anniversary edition of the best-selling and much loathed “tickle-me-Elmo” - the Elmo TMX (see this video on YouTube). In the cherished Elmo tradition, this toy seems rather annoying, but I also know that these robotic toys often inspire hackers, and I can’t wait to see what the geeks are going to do with Elmo when they figure out how to hack him (Elmo probably run a Linux flavor). Yeah, like the geeks who hacked “Big Mouth Billy Bass” and tried to turn the singing fish into a video-conference device.

In the meantime, we’ll have to contend with the less creative, but quite effective Elmo Extreme on Fire (video). The images of the little red monster doing its giggle routine, while burning to a crisp, is oddly disturbing and cathartic at the same time. Enjoy, I guess …

How many types of computer networks do you know? There is the most common TCP/IP networking, across copper, fiber or wireless (very likely that is what you are using to read this page). IPv6 is the new kid on the block, and some may remember the old stuff, like Tokenring and IPX, and when all else fails, good, old sneakernet is never down! Now there is also DieselNET. On DieselNET, data take the bus - no not the SCSI bus! The BUS, as in public transportation! No joke! In this implementation of a packet-switched network protocol, the data are ferried across town by hitching a ride on the buses of the Amherst PVTA transportation system.

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst Diverse Outdoor Mobile Environment (DOME) Project is researching technology for disruption tolerant networking (DTN) systems (via NetworkWorld).

DieselNet currently consists of 40 buses each with a Diesel Brick, which is based on a HaCom Open Brick computer (P6-compatible 577Mhz CPU, 256MB RAM, 40GB hard drive, Linux OS). The brick is connected to three radios: an 802.11b Access Point (AP) to provide DHCP access to passengers and passersby, a second USB-based 802.11b interface that constantly scans the surrounding area for DHCP offers and other buses, and a longer-range MaxStream XTend 900MHz radio to connect to our throwboxes. Additionally, a GPS device records times and locations. Our custom software allows us to push out application updates, take mobility, AP-to-bus connectivity, and bus-to-bus throughput traces.

UMass Amherst - DOME website, Nov. 23, 2006

The idea here is to create systems that can route messages without knowing exactly where the message is going, because most nodes are only up for limited amounts of time (an average of 20 percent on DieselNET). So when two nodes are in range, they query each other for the other nodes they are likely to encounter along the route, and they pass messages along based on that information.

Why bother? Well, for one, DARPA has money for this kind of research. And I am sure the military has all kinds of ideas for implementations. Imagine a couple of dozen/hundred/thousand nodes (people who carry a wireless computer or robot/rover devices). If these nodes were moving about in more or less predictable ways, and not scattered too widely, a DTN could relay messages within that group within seconds from one end to another and failures of individual nodes have very little impact on the system as a whole. You can see, perhaps, why the military might be interested in this idea. But I think there might be also very useful civilian uses, like in disaster recovery, exploration of extreme environments (space, under water) and maybe in regular communications.

BTW: if these folks have their way, DieselNET should really be BiodieselNET!

For better or for worse - the Personal Computer turns 25 years today. In August 1981, IBM introduced the PC to the masses. Since then, the little beige box has changed the world and left quite a legacy.

The jet engine in Ron Patrick’s car puts out 1,450 horsepower.
Photo by Ron Patrick, SF Chronicle

Why would a 48-year-old engineer want to bolt a Navy surplus General Electric T58-8F jet engine into the hatchback of a New Beetle? Just because he can: “This is entertainment. It’s a toy, a toy for silly boys” he says. It’s the ultimate hot rod. And like most hot rods it’s kind-of fun and pretty pointless. Too bad. All this creative energy expended and the problem that was solved is “can I power a beetle with a jet engine?”

Philips is working very hard these days to piss off consumers, as acknowledged by one one of their recent patent applications. Odd thing, you think, for a consumer electronics company to create technology to disenfranchise and piss off consumers? Seems disingenuous? Yet, this seems to represent a new industry trend. Consider the recent whooping Sony received over its bungled attempts to impose its will on consumers. Now Philips is handing consumer-rights lawyers this little gem:

If a new idea from Philips catches on, the company may not be very popular with TV viewers. The company’s labs in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, has been cooking up a way to stop people changing channels to avoid adverts or fast forwarding through ads they have recorded along with their target programme.
-snip-
Philips suggests adding flags to commercial breaks to stop a viewer from changing channels until the adverts are over. The flags could also be recognised by digital video recorders, which would then disable the fast forward control while the ads are playing.
Invention: The TV-advert enforcer, Barry Fox, NewScientist.com news service, 18 April 2006
(via Slashdot)

Now that’s what I call a challenge to the marketing department. Can’t wait to see Philips spin this technology to consumers. Maybe they’ll collaborate with La-Z-Boy and create a recliner chair that will strap you in and force your eyelids open while ads are on during the Superbowl. Thank god I don’t have cable TV.

New Google Brain to Keep “Golden Copy” of Your Deepest Hopes, Fears, Secrets

Today Google introduced a new product, Google Brain. Building on its popular Google Goggles, a headset that records users’ audiovisual sensory input and uploads it to Google’s servers, the Brain attachment will build and transmit to Google a constantly-updated computer model of the user’s mind. Users will be able to access their brains from any computer using their Google Account and a nifty AJAX interface.

“Storing your precious memories and deepest darkest secrets in your own gray matter is an unnecessary inconvenience and leaves users’ minds vulnerable to disease, blunt objects, and substance abuse,” said Google spokesman Joe Orwellian. “But with Google holding a copy of your brain, you know it’s safe! And just imagine the customized user experience Google will be able to offer when your every dream and nightmare is being scanned by our ad-bots.”

In response to privacy concerns voiced by EFF, Orwellian replied: “They just don’t understand: sometimes you have to give up a little privacy for convenience. Besides, the copies of users’ brains on Google servers will be encrypted to prevent snooping.” Asked if Google itself would have the key and be able to decrypt brains at the request of law enforcement or civil litigants, Orwellian responded, “Well, duh.”

Don’t forget to check zeitgeist.google.com to see what Google Brain users are thinking about right now!

via the EFF - those guys crack me up!

The BBC reports on a weird trend of people taking their mobile phone to their grave. The origin of this idea was fear of being buried alive, according to Martin Raymond, director of international trend-spotting think-tank, The Future Laboratory. However, that does not explain cremations with cell phones:

“We came across this in places like South Carolina in the US - people were being burned but unknown to the crematorium, they had left the phones in their jackets,” Mr Raymond said.
“If you heat a mobile phone battery, it tends to explode, and the first reports were about explosions, and that’s how they started noticing this trend.”
BBC NEWS | Handsets get taken to the grave, Wednesday, 29 March 2006.

Besides the exploding crematorium, wouldn’t it be weird if you were walking alone in a graveyard past a fresh grave, and you’d start hearing the beeps or a chirp or ring-a-ling of a phone from the general direction of that grave?

I know - I know, I’m a geek! But this is cool: I overclocked my slug. The NSLU2 as supplied from Linksys actually runs the little MIPS IXP420 CPU at 133 MHz, which is half its rated clock speed. You can fix the NSLU2 to run the processor at the full 266MHz by removing a single resistor. I used a 99-cents nail clipper and snip-snip turned my little toy into a TurboSLUG. The Apache server on the slug now hosts a mirror of my website off of a 1-gig flash memory drive. There are no moving parts, so it does that not only very quietly, but now also at unprecedented speeds!

Well maybe that’s finally going to put these idiots at AOL out of business. AOL announced in January that they started giving preference to email senders who subscribe to the pay-per-email Goodmail service. So if you pay up, you can spam the hell out of AOL users.

As part of its e-mail security practices, AOL blocks the display of images and hyperlinks on most high-volume messages, except if senders are on the AOL Enhanced whitelist and maintain very low complaint rates. Beginning today, AOL will also allow senders who have undergone accreditation through Goodmail to display images and hyperlinks by default. Goodmail charges accredited companies a fraction of a cent per message sent.
AOL to Implement E-mail Certification Program. ClickZ News, January 30, 2006

Brilliant. That’ll just increase the incentive for people who want control over their inbox to sign up with a hosting provider, where you can get your own email server for something like $10/year with unlimited accounts. You don’t get a Gig of space with that, but if you get your own domain you also get a lot less spam and don’t need that much space.

The EEF is up in arms over this and they make a very good point:

Email being basically free isn’t a bug. It’s a feature that has driven the digital revolution. It allows groups to scale up from a dozen friends to a hundred people who love knitting to half-a-million concerned citizens without a major bankroll.

Email readers and senders will both lose, because the incentives for Yahoo, AOL, and Goodmail are all wrong. Their service is only valuable if it “saves” you from their spam filters. In turn, they have an incentive to treat more of your email as spam, thereby encouraging people to sign up.
AOL, Yahoo and Goodmail: Taxing Your Email for Fun and Profit, Deep Links, EEF, February 08, 2006

Now MoveOn has started a campaign to get AOL to back down. I say let’s see if this is not going to just put AOL out of business, because people are going to see all this AOL-sanctioned spam in their inbox. If that’s not going to make people think about finding a different email service, what will?

Last night I stayed up until 2:00 AM tinkering with my SLUG server - a modified Linksys NSLU2 device. V1 ran off of an old, noisy hard drive attached to it via the USB port. Last week I got a 1GB flash drive and I formatted it with an ext3 partition. The plan was to get rid of the hard drive and run the SLUG off of the flash drive.

After several failed attempts to save the configuration and re-unsling to the flash drive, I just went ahead and re-flashed the SLUG with unslung 5.5, using the Windows SerComm Upgrade tool to upload the firmware. After I unslung to the flash drive, the machine booted just fine to the rootfs on the drive. I proceeded to install an FTP server, CUPS (for the attached printer), Apache 2 (incl PHP module) and a small browser.

Now my SLUGsite lives at yovo.dyndns.info and I plan to use it to supplement my regular website with the extra space. Also, running CUPS on that little box, I can now print to a color ink jet printer attached to the device and turn off one of the desktop computers in the basement that used to run just to make the printers available on the network.

Lately I have found myself staring at this. It’s mesmerizing and it makes me wonder about the quality we call “random” (as opposed to the mathematical concept). I think our brain is just really wired to try very hard to extract meaning out of visual stimuli and it is very hard to get it not to try, even when you turn off the ominous soundtrack:

Flickeur (pronounced like Voyeur) randomly retrieves images from Flickr.com and creates an infinite film with a style that can vary between stream-of-consciousness, documentary or video clip. All the blends, motions, zooms or timeleaps are completely random. Flickeur works like a looped magnetic tape where incoming images will merge with older materials and be influenced by the older recordings’ magnetic memory.

Careful with the Flickeur. You might just find yourself staring at it for hours … until it eats up all your computer’s memory and the poor thing goes belly-up.

The SLUG’s alive! Friday I bought another Linksys NSLU2 and spent most of the weekend hacking it. I re-flashed it with the uNSLUng v5.5 beta firmware, configured a thttpd web server, a CUPS print server and a set up an automated torrent downloader.

The little Linksys box is sold as a home-network NAS device for external USB drives. It does that quite well: the first one I bought runs on the OEM firmware and reliably makes my 300GB main storage drive available on our little home network. When I read more about this clever $90-device, it became clear that I could replace two of the full-size PCs that normally run 24/7 in our basement to make printers available and run other processes.

So, I hooked up an old backup harddrive, and dug into the Linux system of my SLUG. The nslu2-linux.org site is extremely helpful and provides how-tos and documentation. I am not much of a Linux hacker, but this is a great opportunity to figure out some of this stuff. After some RTFM moments I got the web server and print server going. The only thing that bothers me about this setup is the noisy damn harddrive. I’ll see if I’ll get a new, quieter drive, or maybe run this setup off of a flash drive. In any case, I’ll have to redo the whole thing, since the uNSLUng process does move parts of the OS to the USB device and the additional packages are also installed on the USB device.

The reason is that the “quiet computer” aspect of this project is half the fascination. With a flash drive, or two, plugged into the SLUG, this is a quiet, low-power computer, smaller than a CD box-set and more powerful than my old Pentium I laptop. The processor is a 130 MHz ARM on an Intel board, which is apparently what Linksys usually does. The small built-in RAM disk can be supplemented with external storage, and when you add a paging file, this little box can be thoroughly souped up.

Finally, if you really want a “high-performance SLUG” you can overclock the CPU, or rather de-underclock it. The little box comes throttled down, and following the instructions, you can pop off a transistor and restore it to its full 266 MHz glory. That’ll be a project for another three-day weekend …

WOW - deep-fried nerd alert! Are you ready for the grease PC? The guys at Tom’s Hardware posted the report of some Germans who had the - uh - intriguing brainstorm to take a high-performance PC, rip out all the fans and dip the whole thing in 8 gallons of canola oil, to see what would happen:

Common sense dictates that submerging your high-end PC in cooking oil is not a good idea. But, of course, engineering feats and science breakthroughs were made possible by those who dared to explore the realms of the non-conventional. Members of the Munich-based THG lab are only too happy to confirm this fact. And not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn’t short out when we filled the sealed shut PC case with cooking oil–but the non-conductive properties of the liquid coupled created a totally cool and quiet high-end PC, devoid of the noise pollution of fans. The PC case - or should we say tank - also offered a new and novel way to display and show off your PC components.
Strip Out The Fans, Add 8 Gallons of Cooking Oil, by Frank Völkel, Tom’s Hardware, 9 Jan 2006

Oh boy - German engineering, oder was? They should really use recycled fryer oil instead of virgin oil. Makes more environmental sense.