Category Archives: Technology

Stephen Fry ‘s blog

Posted on by

I heard that Jeeves, er Stephen Fry, had a blog and tried to reach it the other day, only to find that its hosting server had been blown over by the demand. I forgot to go back until I read Martin Weller’s comments on it.

So I tried again and was transfixed by the first post, which is a startlingly erudite essay on a syndrome familiar to all geeks — the tendency to believe that sometime, somewhere someone will invent the Gadget that will help us sort out our lives. Stephen Fry is rich enough to buy anything the moment it appears on the market, and by God he has.

“I have”, he writes,

“over the past twenty years been passionately addicted to all manner of digital devices, Mac-friendly or not; I have gorged myself on electronic gismos, computer accessories, toys, gadgets and what-have-yous of all descriptions, but most especially what are now known as SmartPhones. PDAs, Wireless PIMs, call them what you will. My motto is:

I have never seen a SmartPhone I haven’t bought.”

He’s VERY knowledgeable about this stuff. In fact he reminds me of Douglas Adams, who was as excited about the Macintosh as I was when it appeared. I remember once visiting him in his house in — I think — Islington and being overcome with envy after being taken round a lovely airy attic room stuffed full of Apple gear. Stephen Fry’s place in Norfolk must be much the same.

The $100 laptop — update

Posted on by

Jim Gettys, VP of Software for the One Laptop Per Child project was in Cambridge today and gave an impromptu seminar at the Computer Lab. It was a fascinating insight into the amount of hard work and ingenuity that has gone into the design of this elegant little gizmo:

Jim had three of the laptops in his bag and left them out for us to examine.

I took notes as he talked and may blog a full account later. But, looking back, the headlines are:

  • Wireless networking is central to the project, and it does mesh networking in a really neat way. My Airport card picked up the mesh immediately, and it was interesting to see the neat way the OLPC interface represents other wireless nets.
  • They’ve done a lot of hard thinking about power consumption and have come up with some very neat tricks for paring down consumption. The CPU is off much of the time, for example.
  • The display (a custom-built 7.5″ 200 dpi TFT ultra-low power consumption screen) is readable in bright sunlight. Jim had a nice slide of the laptop alongside a traditional HP laptop in blazing sunshine. Guess which screen is an unreadable black?
  • The laptop has a built-in camera — rather like the iSight built in to Intel Macs. Kids love this, apparently.
  • There are plans to sell OEM versions of the laptop in developed countries — but for considerably more than $100.
  • Conventional file systems are pretty baffling to a young kid who doesn’t know how to read yet. So the OLPC has, as its central idea, the concept of a time-ordered journal. (This also helps with decisions about what to throw away: you’re less tempted to keep old stuff).
  • The OLPC Chat protocol is “loosely based” on Jabber.
  • Open source software is a key and integral part of the project.
  • Making the machines look very much like a kids’ toy is part of the anti-theft strategy. (Any adult with one who isn’t a teacher will be suspect.) Also it helps that it doesn’t run Windows (makes it less desirable to thieves).
  • The project is running into ‘political’ difficulties in certain targeted countries. These difficulties are partly caused by certain Western companies — but, interestingly, not Microsoft. Now I wonder which large chip manufacturer might be involved?

    • After Jim had finished, he was mobbed by a few people. The students went straight for the laptops, though!

    All in all, it was a terrific event. Thanks to Jon Crowcroft for organising it.

    Postscript: The “bunny ears” on the laptop are in fact WiFi antennae!

    Andrew Keen’s Best Case

    Posted on by

    David Weinberger has done something really interesting. He’s taken Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur and extracted from it the gist of the case that Keen is trying to make — and then discusses it critically but fairly. This is an interesting departure from the usual mode of public argument — in which people build straw men from wilful misrepresentations of other people’s arguments, and then proceed to destroy their creations.

    There’s also a rather good debate between Andrew Keen and the Guardian‘s Emily Bell — which Keen graciously concedes that Emily won.

    Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia

    Posted on by

    This is lovely — a Wikipedia page detailing errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia.

    This page catalogs some mistakes and omissions in Encyclopædia Britannica (EB) and shows how they have been corrected in Wikipedia. Some errors have already been corrected in Britannica’s online version.

    These examples can serve as useful reminders of the fact that no encyclopedia can ever expect to be perfectly error-free (which is sometimes forgotten when Wikipedia is compared to traditional encyclopedias), and as an illustration of the advantages of an editorial process where anybody can correct an error at any time. However, this page is not intended to be a comparison of the overall quality of both encyclopedias, nor as a dismissal of concerns about the reliability of Wikipedia.

    Thanks to my colleague Andrew Cupples for the link.

    So what happened to Skype on August 16?

    Posted on by

    From the Skype blog…

    On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.

    The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.

    So it was all Microsoft’s fault then? Er, not quite.

    Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly. Regrettably, as a result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days.

    The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype. We can confirm categorically that no malicious activities were attributed or that our users’ security was not, at any point, at risk.

    This disruption was unprecedented in terms of its impact and scope. We would like to point out that very few technologies or communications networks today are guaranteed to operate without interruptions.

    Hmmm…. Maybe. But, as GMSV observes,

    what about interruptions that result from a scheduled event that has been occurring once a month for three years now? Each Patch Tuesday, Microsoft sends out its latest batch of fixes, and the millions of Windows machines dutifully download and reboot. What was different in this case? That’s just one of the issues that still need to be addressed if Skype and its owner, eBay, hope to rebuild trust.

    There’s some scepticism in the blogosphere about the Skype explanation. For example, this:

    1.Windows Update by default runs at 3am local time. So even if all Windows-based PCs in the world would restart they would not restart all at the same time, but over a 24 hour “follow the sun” period. The entire Skype user based is spread over 24 time zones, not in a single time zone.

    2.Windows Update is delivered every second Tuesday of the month, and has been for the last three years. Why it only happened now?

    3.Windows Update starts on Tuesday, and counting the timezones, the last country to reach that time would be here in New Zealand, which happens to be Wednesday morning local time. If the problem happened Thursday as claimed by Skype, this was Friday morning in New Zealand, almost two days after the automatic Windows Update.

    Footnote: By my reckoning the next Windows Patch Tuesday is 9/11. I just mention it.

    Cloudprint

    Posted on by

    John Markoff reports a new initiative by HP in today’s New York Times

    PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 18 — Hoping to alleviate a frustration of mobile computing, Hewlett-Packard has quietly introduced a free service designed to make it possible to print documents on any printer almost anywhere in the world. Cloudprint, which was developed over a period of several months by a small group of H.P. Labs researchers, makes it possible to share, store and print documents using a mobile phone.

    The service emerged as the result of a conversation begun at the laboratory this year over how the computer and printing company might benefit from the introduction of the Apple iPhone, according to Patrick Scaglia, H.P.’s director for Internet and computing platforms technologies at the research lab.

    “The world is going to flip,” Mr. Scaglia said. “We want to ride the wave of the Web.”

    The underlying idea is to unhook physical documents from a user’s computer and printer and make it simple for travelers to take their documents with them and use them with no more than a cellphone and access to a local printer.

    The service requires users to first “print” their documents to H.P. servers connected to the Internet. The system then assigns them a document code, and transmits that code to a cellphone, making it possible to retrieve and print the documents from any location.

    Later, using the SMS message the service has sent to the user’s cellphone, it is possible to retrieve the documents by entering the user’s phone number and a document code on the Cloudprint Web site. The documents can then be retrieved as a PDF, ready to be printed at a nearby printer.

    The energy costs of traditional computing

    Posted on by

    Interesting BBC piece by Chris Long on the power consumption of PCs.

    Only recently have they become numerous enough to make an energy difference to our world, and more recently still, their power consumption has rocketed.

    “In the mid 90s when the original Pentium processor was introduced, the average computer system could work with a 130/140 watt power supply, which is much lower that it is today,” said Scott Richards of computer component manufacturer Antec.

    “The processor was probably 15 watts of consumption and the graphics cards was about 10 watts of consumption. Then you had your hard drive and your floppy drive, so even given the 10 or 20 percent headroom you need to operate the computer you could easily do a 130/140 watt power supply.

    “Today we are selling power supply units at 1,200 watts.”

    My feeling is that the article exaggerates the power consumption of today’s PCs, but the general point remains true — that PC-based networking architecture is enormously wasteful in energy terms. I’m astonished that companies don’t pay more attention to the power consumption of their office networks. This is even more important in the developing world, where electricity is not only hard to get, but often incredibly expensive. It’s a major selling point for our Ndiyo networking architecture.

    And then there’s the even thornier question of the power requirements of server farms…

    Thanks to Sumptuous for the link.

    Virtualisation comes to Wall Street

    Posted on by

    From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

    VMware, a company recently known only to hard-core technologists, debuted as the darling of Wall Street on Tuesday, with an opening-day surge that exceeded even Google’s historic 2004 launch.

    Stock of the Palo Alto maker of “virtualization” software soared 76 percent, eclipsing Google’s 18 percent first-day gain. VMware’s value at closing was $19.1 billion – ranking it as Silicon Valley’s third-largest home-grown software company after Oracle and Adobe Systems. It was the largest initial public offering since Google achieved a $27 billion valuation.

    As if that wasn’t enough, Citrix announced that it was paying $500m for Xensource, a fascinating virtualisation outfit that emerged from the Cambridge Computer Lab.

    Slidecasting

    Posted on by

    Here’s something I’ve been waiting for — Slidecasting. It’s a creation of SlideShare.net which enables one to synchronize PowerPoint slides and audio files.

    To create a slidecast, you upload slides to SlideShare.net. The associated audio file can be hosted anywhere on the web. Then you link the slides and audio by using an online synchronization tool. When someone plays the slidecast, the audio is streamed from its location and plays with the slides. And it’s free. I’ve seen some examples, and it looks good. The only question is: where’s the catch?