WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
I'm afraid it's a somewhat truncated Winding Down this week. Disaster struck yesterday while I was working on my game, Federation 2. Suddenly, the entire Linux virtual machine went down, taking my work with it. This is very unusual, Linux is the nearest thing to rock solid I've ever come across. Some experimentation indicated that it was a hardware fault. The 1TB external Western Digital drive on which I keep my personal work was failing. The chunks of stuff, including my Federation 2 work, and the stuff I collect for Winding Down were missing or partially missing, and the transfer rate of the rest was slow enough to be measured in tens of bytes/second, indicating a massive number of errors.
There were a couple of things that stopped it being a complete disaster though. I bought the disk from Amazon about six weeks ago, so I contacted them via their web site and explained the problem. I confess I thought I was in for a long argument, since it was definitely out of their automatic 30 day return period. I was totally wrong, I admit it. Within an hour - yes less than an hour - I got an e-mail back saying that they were sending a new drive express delivery on Monday (the next working day). No charge, we're sorry you had a problem. Wow! The only proviso was that I must return the defective version within 30 days, or they will charge my credit card for the new one. That sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Now that's what I call Service with a very big 'S'. Amazon gets a lot of slagging off for some aspects of its service, including from me (think of it remotely deleting Orwell's 1984 from people's Kindle e-book readers). This time I think ten house points and a gold star are well deserved. The test of how good a company is, is not that it never has problems, but how well it responds to problems when they occur!
The other bright spot is the service known as github. Github is a repository for people (and companies) who use the git distributed source code versioning system, which I do. In this case all of my Federation 2 code is not only on the dead part of the disk, but also safely stored on github, at a cost of a few dollars a month. Phew! I may have lost a few hours work, but fortunately, that's all that's missing.
However, even though I can't get at most of my Winding Down material, I have been able to put together a small amount of stuff from memory, just to keep you going until next week. The interesting thing looking through it is that I seem to have mostly remembered the more positive stories!
Shorts:
First I'd like to point you at a fabulous set of pictures of the successful launch of the Falcon 9 rocket on Friday. They are on the Spaceflight Now web site, and the fifth, sixth and seventh ones are brilliant photographs in their own right - I would love to have a large enough copy of the seventh one to use as wallpaper.
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/001/launch/
Wanna see some -real- archive material? Muppets and IBM in the 60's and 70's. Yes truly! It seems that a couple of years before the Muppet breakthrough in Sesame Street, Rowlf the Dog was the star of a series of internal IBM clips, when he used an IBM Selectric (remember them?) typewriter to write home to his mom about life as an IBM salesman. Other well known characters making an early appearance include Kermit making a presentation while trying to fend off an earlier take on the cookie monster. It's amazing - IBM with a sense of humor!
http://technologizer.com/2010/05/31/ibm-muppets/
I see that HP have stepped in with scanner technology and expertise to help the UK's Bletchley Park - the World War II code breaking centre - scan in the hundreds of thousands of documents it has in storage, so that they are available online. Until recently all funding received by the trust has gone into just keeping the roof watertight, and sealing up the temporary huts until funds are available for renovation. I'm sure this is going to prove to be amazingly useful - why, for instance, did they need 4,400 tonnes of mercury from Spain?
It will be years before the full archives are available online, but I for one am looking forward to it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/10239623.stm
OK, this has nothing to do with high tech, but I couldn't resist. It seems that the inhabitants living around Darwin, Australia, are suffering from drunken (or possibly stoned) parrots falling out of the sky! About eight or ten of the red-collared lorikeets a day are falling out of the sky. No one quite knows what it is that they are imbibing that renders them unfit to fly (not to mention drive), but it must be pretty potent to make them lose their sense of balance quite so drastically! As the woman in Katz's Delicatessen in the film 'When Harry met Sally' said, "I'll have what she's having!"
http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/journal/drunken-parrots-falling-from-sky.htm#ixzz0ps2HSRJW
Homework:
Keep an eye out for Sony's new flexible display. There have been a number of flexible display being touted recently - notably from Samsung and HP - but this one is different. Not only is the screen itself flexible, but so are the control circuits, so you can roll the screen up (as tight as 4mm diameter) and the thing still works. The sample shown by Sony had been rolled and unrolled over 1,000 times.
The stuff Sony are showing off at the moment is only a prototype OLED display, and it's only a 4.1 inch screen. However, even that screen has a 432x240 resolution, and a contrast ratio of 1000:1, which isn't to be sniffed at. So, don't expect a curvy bendable 42 inch TV to appear any time soon. It does however give a glimpse of the future - army generals and cartographers will love it!
http://singularityhub.com/2010/05/29/sonys-new-flexible-oled-display-can-roll-into-tiny-cylinder-while-playing-video/
Geek Toys:
Yes, I now have a glimpse of the ultimate printer for you. Built out of Lego and a felt tip pen, it will print out your 'Hello World' programs with the best of them - and the ink doesn't cost more per cc than Krug vintage champagne! What more could you want? OK, OK, it also has Lego men organizing the printing for you. Take a look at this video and weep that you didn't think of it first:)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX09WnGU6ZY
If that doesn't grab you, how about a drive in the countryside? If that's how you get your kicks, do I have the car for you, guv. James Bond's Aston Martin, no less. You know, the one from Goldfinger and Thunderball, still with all of Q's mod cons - oil slick dispenser, smokescreen, bulletproof shielding, ejector seat, and revolving license plate. It even still has the machine guns hidden in front indicators. They don't work any more, but you can still make them pop out if someone starts to exhibit road rage. Make my day, punk!
All this and only 30,000 miles on the clock! The car is up for auction in October in Battersea, London, and expected to go for something in the region of US$4 million. So, if you want to be able to tell the Beach Boys where to put their Little Deuce Coupe...
http://www.reghardware.com/2010/06/02/aston_martin_db5_james_bond_auction/
Scanner:
US Navy's plane-hurling mass driver in tech hiccup
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/12/emals_backfire/
Guatemala 'sinkhole' presages worse to come
http://news.discovery.com/earth/dont-call-the-guatemala-sinkhole-a-sinkhole.html
Rave reviews at robotic robot-roaster raygun rollout
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/01/laws_laser_lights_up/
Google relents, will hand over European Wi-Fi data
http://www.itworld.com/internet/109953/google-relents-will-hand-over-european-wi-fi-data
Intel unveils ultrathinnest ultrathin
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/01/canoe_lake/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, and to Slashdot's daily newsletter for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Spamato spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
6 June, 2010
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
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