Android and smart phones: change of opinion?
For years I've been saying that smart phones are not worth the trouble. And now I have had an Android tablet for over 6 months. Have I changed my opinions? The first mention was a suggestion from Tom Maynard to take a smart phone to my greenhouse for identification purposes. My objections at the time were price, network coverage and display resolution. I suspect I was wrong in assuming that it would have to be a mobile network; I specifically mentioned the availability of an 802.11 network, but implicitly discounted it. And since then my assumption of a price of $800 has dropped to below $200, and the resolution of my current tablet is towards the low end at 1280×800.
Internet in 20 years?
I'm currently doing Charles Severance's course Internet History, Technology, and Security. Although I've been living in networks for decades, it's interesting, and it fills in a few gaps. One of the assignments is: Write an essay that imagines how the Internet will be different 20 years from now . That's an interesting thought, and so I wrote more than the 1000 word limit. There's nothing surprising there. I don't really see any killer app coming: it's more a social issue now. I think network speeds will stagnate somewhere between 100 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s, unless the unexpected killer app shows up. No more paper newspapers, few books, no more radio-frequency radio or TV broadcasts, few physical shops.
Microsoft: no strerror ()
It seems that Microsoft space programs don't like to scare users with error messages, and when they do, they try to be as vague about it as possible. But a couple of days ago I got a different error message while trying to update dischord, my Microsoft Windows machine, something like: Can't install update: error 0x80072f78 The use of Unix-like 0x to represent a hex number shows that this isn't typical Microsoft. But what does the code mean? Why don't they have an error string, like strerror () returns?
JSON Redux AKA RFC7159
The IETF has just revised its JSON spec; the new version is RFC7159 that link is to the IETFs traditional line-printer format, Ive parked an HTML version at rfc7159.net for people who want to actually read the thing not just link to it. [Disclosure: I edited RFC7159.] Highlights RFC7159 cleans up some ambiguities and inconsistencies in various JSON definitions, none of which caused any real-world pain. More important, it captures industry experience about stupid things you can do in your JSON that are allowed by the spec but will cause problems in practice. If youre interested, I recommend opening up the HTML version and searching forward for the string interop .
4K monitors on the way?
For years I've been waiting for high-definition monitors to show up. 14 years ago I had two Hitachi SuperScan 813 monitors with a resolution of 2048×1536 (3 MP). That was the highest I had for over 12 years, until September 2012, when I got my 2560×1440 monitor, but I still don't have a monitor with a vertical resolution as high as that of the Hitachis. Now, finally, 4K TVs with a resolution of 3840×2160 pixels are coming on the market at prices people can afford to pay. Andy Snow and others on IRC pointed me at this page, describing the 39" Seiki SE39UY04.
A shampoo for Yvonne
Yvonne is also taking a large number of photos nowadays. Up until yesterday she had taken 8,523 photos or videos in less than 3 years with her Canon IXY 200F. Up to now she has been processing them with xv, which offers a relatively limited range of processing options. In particular, in view of my success with Ashampoo Photo Commander 11, I thought that I could migrate her to that as well. That required a number of things. It runs on dischord, my Microsoft box, so I had to set up a user for her and enable remote access. Here Microsoft's limitations are particularly apparent.
Podcast: Cold Equations and Moral Hazard
Here's a reading (MP3) of my latest Locus column, Cold Equations and Moral Hazard which considers the way that science fiction can manipulate our ideas about the technical necessity for human misery, and how that narrative can be hijacked for self-serving ends. Apparently, editor John W. Campbell sent back three rewrites in which the pilot … [Read more]
Cold Equations and Moral Hazard: science fiction considered harmful to the future
My latest Locus column is "Cold Equations and Moral Hazard", an essay about the way that our narratives about the future can pave the way for bad people to create, and benefit from, disasters. "If being in a lifeboat gives you the power to make everyone else shut the hell up and listen (or else), … [Read more]
A use for Ashampoo
Last night I took more silly photos of Chris Bahlo with the dogs. And I've found a disadvantage in my new Meike flash unit: though it recharges relatively quickly (about 4 s with NiZn batteries after a full discharge), the lower capacity means that the full discharge happens more often. In addition, lack of full charge doesn't stop my camera from taking photos when not enough charge is available. I need to check whether that's a camera setting, or whether there's something wrong. In any case, the result were some seriously underexposed photos. How well can I compensate for that with the processing?
Microsoft space strangenesses
House photo day today, the extended set on the first Saturday of a month. And lately I've been doing more and more of my processing on a Microsoft platform. The software may perform the required operations, but I never cease to marvel how difficult it is to interact with all of this software. Never mind that Olympus Viewer can't remember its settings from one minute to the next, or that DxO Optics Pro is slower than molasses and sometimes can't read directories: they all seem to have problems just hanging, and the lack of a window manager in Microsoft means that they can get in your way.
MWC
That stands for Mobile World Congress; it happens in early spring in Barcelona, and its mammoth; something like 75,000 people show up to wheel and deal.Theyre wheeling and dealing for big bucks; the mobile industry is huge and for four days almost everyone is here. Ive got no inside information on the nature of the deals the telcos make, with handset makers and antenna engineers and backhaul builders. But heres where they make em; almost every booth has executive meeting rooms , and one of the eight huge halls is nothing but hospitality suites and meetings. What MWC is like Big.
OpenID Connect is Here
Signed, sealed, and delivered as of February 26th. Better than that: In full-volume production at Google and Deutsche Telekom for a while now. Based on OAuth 2, which has been frozen since 2012. Not perfect, but Id call it one of the safer technology deployment bets you can make right now. Lets say OIDC for short, OpenID Connect is kind of klunky. The Basics OIDC specifies a handful of OAuth 2.0 flows; the most important result is an ID Token, which I wrote about last year; one of my favorite pieces of standards-ware in years. An ID Token is an assertion, signed by an IDP, that some particular person was authenticated for the purposes of some particular app.
