A day of upgrades
Today I upgraded both Matsu’s software and hardware. Matsu is now running on Wordpress 2.0 – which, among several improvements, now boasts a very nice WYSIWYG editor, inline file uploading and category management (no planning ahead needed anymore!!) The only thing that I haven’t done is upgrade the flash headers, I’m going to redesign them, so until then I’m using the standard Kubrick theme.
On the hardware side, I found today a UPS that barely fits inside my special server “rack” – so you can enjoy Matsu as often as you like, without (electricity related) interruptions – all other Murphyisms still apply – ADSL going down, computer crashing/dying, etc.
The Complexity of Reality
Εν οίδα ότι ουδέν οίδα – All I know is that I know nothing – Socrates
Almost 25 centuries after the birth of Socrates, never has this statement been more true. Although we’ve achieved some remarkable things, our actual understanding of reality is still very far behind of the little we can actually do with it. The New Scientist magazine published earlier this year a small list that shows that really, the more we know, the more we must realize we know nothing (or very little).
Not that this should be discouraging – quite the opposite. We are in fact living in interesting times, and I believe that we are in the middle of an explosion of the understanding of reality and of what we can do with it. Whether this will lead to the singularity or not is a different (and interesting) discussion.
The home of Matsu
Matsu currently lives in a small bathroom medicine cabinet in the hall of my apartment. It looks nice, and it has a full lenght mirror as a door, which is nice to make those essential necktie adjustments before heading out in the mornings. The cabinet is fastened against the wall which has the phone and electricity sockets, so there are no wires or sockets to be seen on the outside. I drilled holes on the top so the hot air could escape the cabinet, and for the wi-fi antenna.
- Top of the cabinet – DECT phone base – connected to the phone line through an ADSL/POTS splitter (at the bottom shelf)
- First shelf – Asus WL-500g wireless router (802.11g)
- Second shelf – Alcatel SpeedTouch Home ADSL modem
- Third shelf – Iomega 160GB Network drive (connected to the router)
- Fourth shelf – transformer for the Iomega drive
- Fifth shelf – removed
- Sixth shelf – Compaq P3/700MHz/128MB RAM/11.2GB HDD laptop running XP Pro
- Seventh shelf – Power adaptors for everything plus the ADSL/POTS splitter
It’s a bit tight (specially for the laptop), so my future plans are to turn the whole cabinet into a PC using a mini-ATX motherboard, with perhaps some kind of RAID solution to replace the network drive (as the server is always on, and RAID would make me feel more secure). With a nice, silent power supply, it might be quieter than it is now, which is pretty noisy (both the laptop and the network drive’s disks are quite noisy, spinwise). I wouldn’t need a monitor or keyboard, as I access the server through remote desktop. I would also have to design some kind of inner enclosure for the exposed electronics, or get some kind of lock for the mirror door.
Update: The cabinet was bought at a local Habitat store. I don’t know if it’s a regular item, or something they had on that occasion.
Power outage
Matsu was down the whole day today. We had a power outage a bit after 1 a.m., and I forgot to check if the server had powered up correctly when I left this morning. I have to get an UPS that fits my very special server “rack” (I have to do a post on it some day…)
Getting Stuff In
Getting stuff into computers has always been more difficult than getting things out. Although there are several different ways to input text, the venerable QWERTY keyboard still is the fastest widespread way to do it (it’s claimed that the Dvorak keyboard layout allows faster typing speeds, but it never really caught on). Now that everything is becoming mobile and small, a new challenge has appeared – how to input text at the same speed and accuracy as a full sized keyboard on a mobile phone or PDA. We already have the multi-tap and T9 modes on mobile phones, and handwriting recognition, on-screen keyboards, or mini-keyboards on PDAs, but none of these approach the speed and accuracy of touch-typing on a full sized keyboard. The latest The Economist’s Technology Quarterly has an article on new approaches to text input (a subscription is needed to read it). Here’s a summary:
- Quikwriting – a New York University’s Centre for Advanced Technology project by Ken Perlin, who began working on the problem in 1997. It uses a stylus based system in which the words are written using a flower shaped area, running the stylus from the center to the “petals” and back again. Microsoft has licensed the technology, and is developing it for several platforms (under the name XNav), using prototypes that instead of a stylus use a flower shaped button.
- ShapeWriter – IBM is also developing a similar system, but using a hexagonal grid, for use on tablet PCs. It uses a pattern recogntion system, so the system is more tolerant of user inacuracy. The software can be downloaded here if you have a Windows tablet PC or a Wacom style tablet.
- EQx series – Eatoni, instead of moving away from the traditional QWERTY keyboard, is moving towards it. Basically it’s the same thing as the familiar T9 system, but instead of having an alphabetic sequence to the keyboard (2 – ABC, 3 – DEF, etc.), it maps a regular QWERTY layout on the keyboard space, be it a 3×4 phone keyboard, or a 6×4 bigger keyboard. The advantage, besides the familiarity of the layout, is that the system has less “collisions” between words when compared to T9, ie, a smaller number of words that share the exact same keystroke sequences. Which means more accuracy, and less input from the user. Eatoni claims that on mobile phones, T9 has an average collision rate of 1 in 27 words, and the EQ3 system has only 1 in 85 words. When used with a 6×4 keyboard, the collision rate drops to 1 in 1,800.
Although the more conceptual systems seem more elegant, the Eatoni concept looks to me the one with the most immediate future in terms of familiarity, a flat learning curve, and an almost zero cost in current hardware implementation (just changing the T9 software and the keyboard layouts).
