Category Archives: Technology

Culture, Internet, Technology

Geek dinner

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I’m going to my first ever Geek Dinner tonight; it’s with [[Chris Anderson]] of ‘Wired’ fame – he’s got a theory called ‘[[The Long Tail]]’ about how, in and amongst other things, markets and media are evolving from a few mass media, products and services into — thanks to a largely Internet powered world — a mass of niche media, markets etc. There’s a great, and very confusing, quote from Amazon in the Wikipedia article about The Long Tail which might serve to give a practical example of what that means.

I think the Geek Dinners are a great concept, and they seem very popular (at time of writing, there are 72 comments to rsvp, despite the fact that its on a Friday night) — so if anyone has an interest in the topic that’s reading this, please do come along and keep me company. I’ll be the one in the corner who doesn’t know anyone ;).

Internet, Personal, Technology

The importance of being division6

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If a lot of the new, cool, social software out there survives, and I eventually get around to using it, I’ll probably want a consistent digital identity – division6… and was pleasantly surprised to find that I could have that username on both Digg and Reddit today. Now I’m thinking I need to go and register for every other service I might possibly use with my digital identity before I lose it to a bot…

Why not use my real identity? Not because I really really love to give fake names, but rather because invariably, after years of forgetting if I’d registered as armand, armand.david, adavid, adavid01, davidfly, ard30, jard30, etc etc, I’d had enough. And division6 is sufficiently obscure that I’ve been able to capture it on most of the systems I need to thus far :).

Software, Technology

Digital dilemma

Inspired by Charles’ efforts to improve the performance of his Mac without reinstalling the O/S, and finally fed up with the bloating that my Windows install had taken, I resolved this morning to fix it by whatever means necessary – even considering the possibility of a total reinstall and digging up the OEM Windows CD my Dell came with (this, of course, mocked as ‘Windows approach’ by Mac afficionados everywhere). And it had to be done in time for the football…

So I started – initially just uninstalling the useless freeware that I’ve installed over the last two years (the length of time this Windows install has been active and, erm, “stable”), and gradually started to see improvement. After a couple of major hiccups, I decided I needed to clean the bits of the registry that were beginning to really nark me off (bizarre applications for long-since removed hardware still launching, for example…) – and a manual session with ‘regedit’ followed. But there were still bugs.

Frustrated, and reluctant to reinstall Windows and let the Mac-lovers have their moment of triumph, I found a shareware registry doctor, which I’ve since bought, called Advanced Registry Doctor. It rocks: not only does it actually fix some of the more tedious problems I was experiencing, but it lets you browse the startup entries in your registry — and as well as letting you deselect or delete certain components, it (shock, horror) tells you what they are and if you need them active! Good performance bonus there. It also had a registry defragmentation option, which seems to have immediately improved the performance of my PC.

Having done all that, I’ve upgraded a couple of device drivers and the machine seems pretty stable – my NAS drive has thus far failed to cause the blue screen of death, despite a couple of hours continuous operation (it was pretty bad before). I’m geekily pleased with myself.

Of course, it sounds like Charles sorted out his Mac much more easily, and I’m not really winning and PC vs Mac debates here. And I certainly won’t make a grand defence of the system architecture that causes a PC to experience a hundred years of human aging in a 2 year period — my machine was experiencing some serious moments of senile dementia — but it is good to find a workaround. Recommend the above software to anyone whose machine has started to grunt under the weight of its age and either can’t face the prospect of reinstalling or doesn’t have the necessary knowledge to do so.

P.s. I don’t hate Macs, btw. My relationship with Apple is a bit more complex than that and I may blog about it sometime. Suffice to say that I think there’s a lot of truth in this.

Media & Marketing, Technology

Rocket BOOM

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Don’t know how its taken me this long to find out about it (there’s just SO much on this internet thing, I guess) but Robert Scoble pointed me at Rocketboom, which Chris and I decided was a ‘hot geek vlog’. That is, a video log for geeks hosted by a hot chick (as opposed to a vlog for hot geeks) – which, as a bonus, seems really intelligent and professionally put together. Which is hardly surprising, as, according to lots of different sites, it is apparently one of the most popular vlogs on the internet. Check the host, Amanda’s, wikipedia article for more.

And damn, she’s a year younger than me. I want to be famous on the internet (and elsewhere). Wonder if Amanda might at some stage be interested in helping Chris and I our with our new top secret project… (watch this space).

Gaming, Technology

Xbox 360 price drop?

Might be an Amazon specific thing, but they’re doing a 14% discount on the core system, which suggests to me that MS are doing some discounting… either that or Amazon are taking a gamble that you’ll buy a bunch of full priced peripherals to support that.

In any case: stack £180 for an Xbox360 against £425 for a PS3, and factor in the additional 5 months headstart MS still have and what do you get…? Have Sony messed it up big time, this time?

I suspect that I might actually end up getting my first-ever Nintendo console (before I get the new MS/Sony ones) if they can get the WII to work, and give me a decent sports title and hack-and-slash game… we shall see!

Books, Technology

The three laws

Simon B points at an article that reports on new safety guidelines for ‘next generation robots.’ Because he’s on LJ, and I don’t have a LJ login or OpenID (!! – how lazy am I?) I thought I’d comment here…

Simon points out that the three guidelines sound quite similar to Asimov’s three laws of robotics:

The guidelines will require manufacturers to install enough sensors to minimize the risk of the robots running into people and use soft and light materials so they do not cause harm if they do so, the officials said.

They will also be required to install emergency shut-off buttons, they said.

….

There are also efforts under way to create global guidelines. The ministry plans to have its measures reflect the global standards, the officials said.

Asimov’s, for your reference, are:

1. A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Source: Wikipedia.

First of all, how cool is it that the real world is catching up with science fiction (well, a teensy bit)? And secondly: I’m glad the through inaction subclause hasn’t made it into the safety guidelines. Imagine if we had robots wandering around trying to lower our cholesterol intake or preventing us from drinking alcohol in case we were to ‘come to harm’ inadvertently… Always a flaw in Asimov’s laws, I think :P.

Still, it would be concerning if they came up with the zeroth law independently, as Simon comments… ;)

Technology

OpenID – doomed from the start?

Sorry; Sheila’s not quite taken over yet and there may be a couple more techy-ish posts (especially as I seem to be coming down with a cold and a good bit of geekness is always good to get me feeling like I’ve achieved something).

Read about OpenID when trying to comment on a Livejournal blog earlier today; its an “actually distributed identity system.” What this means is, when you want to post a comment asserting that you are someone – e.g. on this blog, asserting you have your own blog at iamcool.net (or whatever clever domain name you’ve chosen ;)) — you don’t have to register for each blogging system that has instituted a registration policy (qua Typepad, Livejournal, etc) — you take your identity with you.

The rationale for requiring registration in the firstplace has a few motivations. (1) To prevent spammers and identity fraudsters from getting too excited over your blog, and a cynical (2) to allow the blog software owners to expand their user base / do some nifty data capture.

But will it work? The net is littered with ‘open’ schemes for one thing or another. The Windows Live login is the only one that has been useful to me to date, and let’s face it, not many organisations have MS’s purchasing power. So what’ll make people adopt OpenID?

Well, support from all the cool guys out there who require registration – Typepad etc. And fast; if people lose interest in this… And I guess the second thing it needs: for anti-spam / anti-fraud software not to get too clever. WordPress lets ZERO comment spam through. Of course, I virtually have to approve every legitimate comment at least the first time around… but the point is that, if you aren’t worried about identity fraud or spamming, you won’t bother with a registration firewall.

At the end of the day, most users dislike these registration walls (alongside the ‘click here to read more’ buttons in blogs), and so will avoid them. I think. So we’ll see… Comment spam is less of a problem for me than many people (with my mighty 63 comments since this blog’s inception in early 2004).

Technology

RSS woes

Apologies to those of you who’ve had issues with my RSS feed for the last few days. I broke it with the upgraded theme and only just noticed (something to do with feedburner redirects, tedious, technical and otherwise uninteresting)… but all fixed now – subscribe away here.

Personal, Technology

The power of social media for holiday planning

Now; there are some things for which the advice of a seasoned professional is invaluable; hifi experts for audiophiles, PC experts for gamers, perhaps even CD-reviewers for music… but there are some things where the opinion of the average, ordinary, everyday human being is exactly what you need to help inform your purchasing decision.

This is one of the many things I’ve noticed when searching for a holiday (current objective: find a place in Key West, FL for the dates I’m planning on being there next month). ‘Objective’ reviews on websites have (a) been hard to find and (b) been unreliable and inconsistent from one to the next. Tripadvisor, however has given me a wealth of information from its hundreds of users.

Whereas a single good or bad review is singularly uninformative, as with the aggregation Rottentomatoes does, there is a certain confidence in numbers… or lack of confidence, as the case may be. The fact that the reviews build constantly over time (and presumably time out at some stage) hopefully points to the possibility that a hotel can redeem its reputation over time. That said, a lot of the hotels in Key West will have their work cut out for them, from the look of things…

Technology

Division6 2.0

So, in exchange for dim sum lunch at the Phoenix Palace (and despite having to tolerate a few hours conversation with me), Chris came over and helped upgrade the site with a few of the tools I’ve been itching for, including:

    A new skin theme
    Expanding side-bar components
    A proper post structure so its immediately apparent where you should comment
    Tagging!!

Hope you like the new site; the skin is based on Copperleaf Plus, and I think is here to stay. Though the masthead may change; we’ll see…