varunnangia.com

One of the pretty nifty new features of Ubuntu 9.04 is its global notification system. Just like Growl for Mac OS (and clone Snarl for Windows), this basically creates a single, unified, neat little notification system that shows up in one spot on the desktop. Not only does this cut down on clutter significantly (just take a look at the mess that is the Windows task tray notifications, if you don’t believe me), but it also makes the whole OS less intrusive, yet highly communicative.

It got me thinking, though, about a universal notification system – as in, for every computing thing in the world. That includes things like “Machine with MAC ID 00:11:22:33:44:55 (‘Varun-Nangias-Mac’) connected to the router” to “Updates available”. In fact, most of the messages (“New SMS on Blackberry”, “Printer on fire”, “New Yahoo! IM from Kats Gupta“, etc.) all fit in 140 characters. Sure you could have longer messages but for the most part, 140 characters is more than enough to communicate the jist of the message and to provide a no-nonsense summary of the event; if you really need more information, you should be able to take further action on by looking up a syslog, or the requisite application. And putting this information in an RSS feed or a Twitter-like stream on the Internet means that it’s easily accessible from almost any device with a web browser.

Given that Laconi.ca already exists and can be deployed to your own server, basically what is missing is software that links clients to the Laconica backend. Ubuntu and Mac OS already have most of that support – the notification systems can forward events that they receive. Windows support is sort of there in the form of Snarl (though very, very few applications use it). A J2ME application is needed for the vast majority of phones out there; an Android phone can have this sort of background daemon running all the time, anyway. Apple would likely need to build some sort of support into its push notification system in order for iPhones to mimic this functionality.

Put all of this together, and you’ve suddenly got a way to aggregate your digital life into a single, very easy, stream of information. Add the ability to respond to certain events via replies (ex.: “Updates available. Reply ‘install’ to install available updates”) and the cost of your remote management system has dropped to pretty much zero. How cool would that be?

My Father is an avid newspaper reader, and occasionally cuts out a few articles (usually letters to the editor or opinion pieces) from said newspapers for me to read. Though I’ve long encouraged him to scan these articles and send them to me, he usually brings them with him whenever he sees me. Which usually means that I end up reading the articles a long time after they are relevant, if I ever get around to reading them in their entirety. This one, however, caught my eye, and three  years after it was written (and two years after it was given to me), it is one of the few articles that I have that are still relevant. Quoting the most interesting part:

“[Y]ou start a new job and the first thing you do is buy a new car and, a month later, a new house? What if the job does not go right? What if your boss hates you or you hate him/her? What if there are other things that drive you crazy at the job (you fill in the blanks)? Given your $400,000 mortgage and $20,000 car financing, will you have the guts to tell your boss to go where the sun does not shine and just leave? Or will you just put up with it, remain in a state of miserable hibernation at work and look for joy and satisfaction outside of work, usually piling up on your material possessions and partying hard to forget?”

You can read the whole thing over at FT.com (which misses the point completely as indicated by its titling): The American Dream and the importance of thinking poor.

About a year ago, my flatmate got herself one those nice little HP Slimline computers. For $340, it was a good deal, and with another $30 out of pocket, and twenty minutes of poking around inside, said computer was rocking twice the memory (with which Vista became usable) and a gigabit Ethernet card (which is sort of mandatory around this house). All in all, she was pleased with it and I was convinced it was a good deal.

Fast forward six months and the computer just sort of blue screens out of the blue for the first time. Convinced that it happened because of a faulty SD card or SD card reader, I toss the card, call it quits. Then it happens again. And again. And again. Which brings us to two weeks ago where the computer wouldn’t even start before blue screening (or, when running in Ubuntu, kernel panicking). All the more odd was that it was every conceivable sort of blue screen – ranging from IRQ errors, to initialization errors, to kernel errors, to the weirdest one of all: an Intel-only error (0x1000007F) that I’ve not seen since the early days of Win2K on a Pentium Pro. The kernel panics were equally weird – but mainly seemed to concern the bus.

I go through the usual culprits (bad RAM, bad PSU are my chief suspects) with no problems, and then out of nowhere it occurs to me that the computer has an Nvidia 6150. And since it was a compact-form factor, it in fact has a Nvidia mobile chip. For those of you lucky enough not to know what that means – basically, just about every NVidia mobile chip manufactured from mid-2007 onwards was not soldered properly and high heat would cause the solder to melt, and the chip to fail. Which, when I reflected on it, made perfect sense: the computer would be doing something computationally demanding, the fan would spin up, and eventually, it would get hot enough for something to affect the Nvidia chip – causing the utterly random blue screen.

Naturally, the motherboard (an Asus GL-6E “Acacia” board) is not covered by HP’s warranty extension for the dying 6150s; that’s only for another bunch of Asus boards. Thus, a little after a year, the computer is quite dead, which really offends me. Or as I put it to my flatmate, “He’s dead, Jim“. And given the weird design of this class of computer’s motherboard (halfway in between a Mini-ITX and a MicroATX), I can’t find an identical replacement* – meaning that the computer is already destined for the garbage heap.

And then they say that we’re getting better at making these things.

*: I can replace the board with a non-HP part – the Zotac GF8200-CE will accommodate (or so I believe) the 65W AMD Brisbane-core processor, the RAM and the hard drive without a fuss. But since Newegg has become really uptight about taking returns**, I can’t even take the $100 chance that I could buy this board and revive the computer.

**: In fact, I’ve basically stopped doing business with Newegg since they became a pain to give money to. Last purchase was in early 2007, and it was an extremely specialty part that couldn’t be gotten anywhere else (RAM for a printer). I fully believe that Newegg has jumped the shark.

If you believe the hype, electronic paper (“e-paper”) displays are going to take over the world. Unlike traditional emissions-based displays like LCD screens, or CRT screens, e-paper displays reflect light and thus look exactly like a piece of paper does. The huge advantage of such a display is that it only draws power when it is changing and that it (supposedly) is easier on human eyes, as it does not flicker and has a wider viewing angle. The Amazon Kindle and the Kindle 2 are the first mainstream e-paper based devices I’ve seen in the U.S. – though e-paper based gadgets have been available commercially ever since the Sony Librie came out in 2004. These are my thoughts about the Kindle 2.

A cousin of mine has the original Kindle. The device was a weirdly shaped wedge, and in the few minutes I had to play with it, I found much to criticize with regard to its industrial design, but I also held out hope that the next generation of the Kindle might have a better designed future. He also was not entirely happy with the catalog of books available, but in browsing the catalog myself, I found that a majority of the books that I am interested in were indeed available in the Kindle shop; since then, the Kindle online shop has only increased in size, though the genres from which books are available have not increased dramatically. Thus, if you’re a science fiction buff, then you’re going to enjoy the Kindle’s selection; a more mainstream fiction person is likely not to enjoy the Kindle store much – and good luck finding any Harry Potter on the Kindle, legitimately.

In its opening letter to you on the Kindle, Amazon states that its goal is to make the Kindle disappear as you’re reading – that they would like you to think of the Kindle as you would any book. After reading a few books on it, I realized that they had largely succeeded. It takes me a few minutes to get into the mode of reading it, but after I do, it goes a lot faster. There are, however, some important caveats that make it possible:

• First, I have always been comfortable reading from a screen – in college, and even to some extent before that, in high school, I was equally happy reading from a screen or from a piece of paper; many people are not.
• Second, I choose to use the Kindle at its smallest font size, which gives approximately the same number of lines on screen as a page from a mass market paperback, meaning my brain accepts the switch reasonably easily; on the other hand, when I was using the Kindle with its default font size (about four points larger), I was getting frustrated how quickly I ran out of text. If I were able to adjust the line spacing slightly down, the Kindle would likely be indistinguishable from the layout of a mass market paperback, but it works closely enough that my brain doesn’t bother distinguishing the two.
• Finally, I do not write in my books or printouts. Call me old-fashioned if you must, but I grew up in a household where murder was less of a crime than writing in books, and I refuse to write in books, or bend their pages to make a bookmark and so on; it pains me to see people scribbling in their books, and I wince if I should end up with a copy of a book that someone else has written in (hence why I rarely, if ever, buy used books). Those heathens of you who do write in your books, however, will find it painful to annotate with the Kindle.

So, there is a target audience that the Kindle can fill the needs of very well. Certainly, it is not yet ready to have replaced the 20 kilos of books and laptop that I was carrying around in college, but it is an important stepping stone on the way to that dream being fulfilled.

Amazon has also gone out of its way (some, including myself, would say intrusively so) to make buying books easy on the Kindle; pressing Menu at any time pops up a menu with “Shop in the Kindle Store” selected by default. From there you can search by starting to type, or by browsing through the Kindle’s quarter of a million books, or hundred odd periodicals. Buying is as easy as clicking Buy; in fact, the combination of a slightly stiff and unresponsive directional pad and Amazon’s decision to make “Buy” the default selection has caused me to buy at least a couple of books accidentally. (I should note here that you are, as always, reliant on Amazon’s continued goodwill in order to return those accidentally bought books). Nonetheless, the store is easy to use, is very convenient (at least, in areas with a Sprint signal) and encourages people to buy books the same way that they would in a bookstore.

Of course, there is a lot more content that is out of copyright, and more recently, available under copyleft licences. Through the Kindle’s free internet browser, a quick visit to a site like freekindlebooks.org or feedbooks.com will net you thousands of out of copyright books, stories and the like – all downloaded directly to your Kindle through the magic of Sprint’s wireless network. More problematic is modern content available under a copyleft licence. For example, one of my favourite modern sci-fi stories, Charles Stross‘ Accelerando, is a collection of nine short stories, all available under a Creative Commons licence, and freely available from accelerando.org. However: 1) Amazon sells a $8 copy in the Kindle store; and 2) Stross does not offer a Kindle optimized file (nor can you, legally, create one, as Stross prohibits creating derivative works); I resorted to sending my Kindle the HTML file and tracking through the story that way, a most unpleasant way of doing so (it also shows me as the author, which is flattering, but wrong).

On the other hand, getting Cory Doctorow‘s Eastern Standard Tribe was as simple as browsing over to Doctorow’s site and downloading the Kindle-optimized file. A proper directory of Kindle-optimized modern stories under a copyleft licence would be very helpful. And I’m guessing that it may even be in Amazon’s interest to establish and provide this directory as it would provide an alternative content stream for their device. Simply adding native PDF reading ability would solve a huge usability gap – even the modern Sony Readers have that ability, and it’s truly a sad day when Sony, that bastion of proprietary formats, has a more open device than any Amazon, a supposedly web- and standard- friendly Internet company.

Ultimately, it’s hard to know exactly what to do with the Kindle – and that comes from someone whose needs are met by the Kindle. As someone who is willing to suspend some of the disbelief that this is not paper, the Kindle 2 is an excellent reading device: light, high contrast and sporting easy access to an extensive content library. To be sure, the always-on connection helps tremendously – it means that I can look up a term on the go (ever tried to read a Neal Stephenson novel?), and download my next book as soon as I finish one. That said, even I, an enthusiastic early adopter, have some reservations with the device itself.

First the form factor is awkward. I would happily forgo the keyboard, or accept a tiny little keypad ala Blackberry, for a much smaller, thicker device. Something physically the size of a paper back, even one of the larger trade paperbacks, would not simply be an easier form factor to carry, it would also make it a little easier to mentally accept the Kindle as a book replacement. Second (and I know this would push the Kindle from book-replacement to full-fledged computer), the OS leaves something to be desired in the customization department. For example, to get to the browser (easily the most used experimental function), I have to go to the device home, click Menu, go down several options to “Experimental” (no easy thing when the screen refresh is so slow) and only then can I open the browser – by which I’ve forgotten what term it was that I was searching for in Wikipedia. Meanwhile, that “Shop in Kindle Store” function is in every menu, sitting unused except for moments when I’m actually interested in buying a book.

Finally, there’s the question of why Kindle the device exists at all. At this moment, I have a very fine little Kindle app on my iPhone, and I cannot help but think that Kindle for Android-based phones, J2ME phones and the like are not very far behind. While those applications certainly lack the all of the Kindle’s features (like shopping in the Kindle store), those are certainly things that can be added to future revisions of the Kindle software. And there are certainly some very compelling reasons to use those existing devices, not the least of which is that they already exist and already have a huge marketplace presence. The Kindle adds yet one more device to carry (and in an uncomfortable form factor at that), and while I go back and forth on the one device or many device argument, a book reader is not one of those additional devices that I would want to necessarily carry – no matter how nicely designed or what advanced screen technology may lie within.

While I don’t doubt Kindle 3 is coming, the only question I have for Amazon is: will the Kindle 3 be the last dedicated device? Because from where I sit, Amazon seems to have solved the most vexing e-book problem of all (content) and is now merely creating more problems by continuing to insist everyone carry yet one more device. There’s a limit to the number of pockets that I have – and I’m not sure the Kindle 2 has earned its own pocket on its own merits. But it is pretty cool to be the first on the block with the future of displays and to have a device that can go weeks between charges.

I got a great kick out of reading some of the comments to this Lifehacker.com article. Just a few days ago, I wondered what it would be like to not have Internet access 24/7 and while I admit to being slightly weirded out by the thought, I thought I could manage.

Then it occured to me that chances are that if my Internet access is down, it’s likely to be because of a weather issue or some local disaster. This is a problem because the Internet is my primary source of news: wandering around the house resulted in one TV (probably also useless since the same people provide Internet and cable) and one radio (slightly closer to the dead side of things than the live) being found and no other real way to get the news without the Internet.

The worst case scenario, of course, is a prolonged power outage, which happens more often than you’d think around here – the spring and autumn rains are pretty devastating when it comes to utilities. Then not only is the main Internet out, but all the devices with wireless connections are soon to follow as the batteries die out.

So, usually I praise HP’s hardware (their software is a different matter) – it’s proved to be pretty durable and reliable despite my best efforts to ruin said hardware. I’ve really not had any significant trouble that HP warranty coverage hasn’t quite happily fixed or replaced. And indeed, this laptop has had a couple of issues over time, all covered by HP.

Some time ago, though, this laptop of mine developed one of those aggravating problems that’s never covered by warranty – the fan started to rattle. While I’m not an audiophile or one of those people that needs dead silence in order to work, once the fan started rattling like a thirty year old car, I knew it was time to replace it. This is not an easy task on this particular HP laptop – you essentially need to disassemble the entire laptop, right down to the case. However, given experience in replacing Apple iBook LCDs (now there is a pain) I felt up to the challenge and got to work by purchasing the replacement on eBay for $50 less than buying the part from HP directly. In fact, it went off very well – I turned off the computer around 10:04AM and it was back on by 11:17AM, according to the system’s log.

However, in doing so, I discovered one thing that seriously boggles the mind: the reason the fan started rattling in the first place was because the fan was dislocated from it’s usual spot. It was dislocated from said usual spot because usual spot was utterly clogged with dirtballs. Dirtballs that are stuck there because – get this – the air guide is a piece of plastic covered in glue stuck to the direct the air from the fan towards the CPU and the heatsink, as illustrated in a badly befitting cross-section diagram below:

Not only does the ball of crap eventually eat back into the fan so that the fan can’t spin properly (leading to the rattling fan issue), it also prevents badly needed cool air to go over the CPU and heatsink, both of which were a toasty 60C when I opened the computer this morning. I can’t even begin to count the ways that this situation could be avoided – starting with using glue only where necessary, as opposed to covering the entire air guide with glue. However, if HP seriously thinks this is good engineering, then I think it’s time I reconsidered buying HP – this engineering effort would have earned me a fail in fifth grade, and that was a long time ago in Mr. Montoya’s class.