The “new generation” game consoles are stacking up to be pretty impressive. All of them are based on variations of the IBM Cell processor technology. The first out was Microsoft’s XBox 360, soon to be followed by Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s entry which was, until a few days ago, code named “Revolution”.

But now Nintendo has announced their new game console’s official name. It will henceforce be called the “Wii”. Yes, that’s it- the whole name…pronounced “we”.

To me it sounds suspiciously like something a 4 year old needing to use the toilet says (”Mommy, I gotta go wee!”). What it doesn’t sound like is a name for a gaming console that I’d ever want to own. Please note that I am *not* commenting here on the merits of Nintendo’s technology or their game products- just the name.

Some marketing guy is laughing his head off right now as he rolls in a huge pile of money Nintendo paid him to come up with this total boner of a name. Wii…good gravy, that’s an embarrasing name.

I installed the IE7 beta on my computer earlier this week, and it *seemed* (on first glance) to be working fine alongside Firefox. But then I started noticing strangeness. My computer auto-rebooted several times due to failure of \WINDOWS\system32\lsass.exe, in one case involving the wdigest.dll module: this might be an indicator of several varieties of virus, but my machine scanned clean with the latest version of Avast, which is usually pretty reliable.

Then I noticed that clicking on an embedded http link in an email message no longer opened a browser window: instead, it opened a file system explorer window. I ran Windows’ “Set Program Access and Defaults” utility to re-confirm that Firefox was my primary browser- that didn’t seem to help. I re-installed Firefox- that didn’t improve things either. Finally, I used the wonderful Windows System Restore feature and reverted back to before I installed IE7. Everything seems back to normal again- I’ll have to wait for 24 hours to see if I continue to see problems with lsass or not. When I switched to using IE7 as my default browser, http links worked fine- I didn’t wait long enough to see if the lsass.exe errors repeated themselves.

Netting it out, my machine (Windows XP 64; AMD Athlon processor; 2 GB of RAM, all current available Windows patches, Avast antivirus, Microsoft AntiSpyware) running Firefox 1.5.0.2 appears to have had problems with IE7 Beta 2. I suspect that if I had run with just IE7 I wouldn’t have had these problems. Alternately, I could have some new virus on my machine that Avast isn’t detecting- but that seems somewhat unlikely.

For now, I’m running without IE7. I’ll check it out again later.

Apparently its cool to “hook up” with other poeple online these days. Services like MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, and LinkedIn abound.

Personally, I don’t have much interest in having hundreds or even dozens of “friends”. I don’t mind chatting in forums with people, but that’s different from calling them a friend. My real friends know who they are, and generally they are people I’ve known for a decade or more- not someone I exchanged some email with now and then. Yes, I have a MySpace presence, but that’s only because I like to keep up with Teresa Noreen, and MySpace is where she has her blog.

A lot of the purpose of these services seems to be to demonstrate how many “friends” you have. There are people who have thousands (!!) of “friends” listed. They go on cross-linking sprees to get more “friends”. I obviously have a much higher standard for who I call “friend” than most of these people do. Having dozens or hundreds (or thousands) of friends implies to me a pretty shallow relationship with each person- I guess that strikes me as rather sad.

Anyway…apparently I’m not the only person who is finding these social networking services are becoming just a bit much. Recently, services like Snubster, Isolatr, and Introverster have started showing up. We are seeing the birth of…antisocial networking?

The really humourous thing….Snubster is now promoting its hate lists as a way to connect with other like-minded haters. So its become a social networking site…sigh.

Technorati Tags: social networking

This was an April Fool’s Joke: DHMO is water (H20)

I’m a small “e” environmentalist. But when I started reading about the proliferation of DHMO in our industry and the horrible damage it can cause to our natural world, my hackles rose. Something has to be done!

Even if we move fast on this, so much damage has already been done- the ignorance and sadness of this situation is hard to contemplate. Every one of us owes it to our little blue home world to take action against this noxious poison!

Technorati Tags: environment, dhmo, peta

I’ve been casually following the story of the Sony Portable Reader- it only became really interesting to me when the price range was announced (around $400 US).

What is the Sony PRS? Its an eBook device- it is for reading digital books in eBook, PDF, or text formats portably. This in itself is far from new- eBook readers of various types have been around for a long time. The two things that leap out and make the Sony Reader particularly interesting to me: its use of e-Ink technology (which has a number of spin-off effects), and its support of standard memory formats (SD and Memory stick).

E Ink is a technology sort of like LCD in appearance, but technically quite different. LCD displays require continuous power in order to display anything- E Ink requires the application of power only to *change*: once something is displayed on an E Ink panel it doesn’t require any further power- you can turn the device off entirely. And this means far less power is required for the device, which means far less in the way of heavy batteries and electronics.

The Sony Reader is literally the size of a paperback (6×4 inches, half an inch thick, 250 grams including rechargable batteries), and its all display. At that size and weight, it can provide over 7,000 page turns (ten novels worth) on a single charge. Note that they measure battery life in page turns, not hours: If you stare at each page for an hour, that could be 7,000 hours of use. That’s nearly 300 days. Unless you have a severe reading disability, you shouldn’t be spending an hour per page- but that’s still an impressive number. 10 novels on a single recharge: that’s a good month of reading. Even assuming you flip back and forth, that’s easily a week, and the old LCD-based ebooks would be lucky to give you a few hours.

The other factor that’s appealing is the storage capacity. The formats the Sony Reader supports are generally “light weight” in terms of storage requirements- and since the display isn’t colour, the amount of storage per page of text is quite small. Sony claims over 100 books in 128 MB- and you can easily carry around several 256 MB SD cards quite economically.

I was already sold at this point…but then Sony’s blurb indicated that their included PC software includes a facility to read RSS feeds and transcribe the data into a format that can be placed on their eBook. Whoa- now I can take all of my website “news” and put it on a small, almost zero power portable device that I can read anywhere.

Now *that’s* something worth looking seriously at.

UPDATE:: Doing a bit more research led me to an even cooler device (working prototype) based on the similar underlying technology- the Phillips Readius. This is what is sometimes called a “rollable display” , and its another spin-off benefit of technologies similar to E Ink. Basically, the organic materials used in making these displays can be placed on flexible substrates that can be rolled up or otherwise “deformed”. Currently, no one has started selling a device based on this technology, but hopefully within two or three years. I recall reading about this two or three years ago- back then, no one had a working prototype and now Philips has spun off an entire company (Polymer Vision), so progress is moving along well…

Technorati Tags: e books, e ink, Sony, PRS 500

I was really hoping it wasn’t true, but apparently it is: Alienware is being bought by Dell.

Why don’t I want it t be true? Well, Alienware builds hand-made boutique machines for the serious gamer. Dell builds commodity by the tens of millions for the home consumer. Dell is so much bigger than Alienware ($55 billion in revenue, 33 million computers in 2005, versus $200 million in revenue and 60,000 computers for Alienware) that it seems fated that Alienware will “disappear”.

But will they? The current CEO and one of the founders of Alienware reminds us that they will be a “wholly owned subsidiary”, which gives them some lattitude to remain “different” from Dell. I hope he’s right. But all that keeps running through my head is a line from Star Trek’s Borg…

We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.

According to some tinfoil hat wearing alarmists in the Netherlands, RFID chips can carry computer viruses

Now, normally, I’d just pass this off as more stupidity generated by the ignorant media. But the guys saying this have degrees, so this is a different class of quackery entirely.

Lets look at current RFID devices. Basically, what we are talking about is a passive electronic device. It sends a code when a low power magnetic field passes nearby. Yes, there are some active RFID devices, but the ones used at stores for product identificaiton most definitely are *not* of this variety. The more advanced type of passive device *can* store data, , but they don’t download “code”- just strings of data. And RFID devices don’t actually *do* anything with this data- they don’t process, just store/regurgitate.

Okay…so how can an RFID device carry a “virus”? Well, they could carry carefully crafted data that in theory could be designed to in some way foul up a badly written program in an RFID scanner. This intrusion would be akin to an SQL injection used on a website- the data isn’t active, but the data causes a failure in poorly written piece of software.

But lets be clear here…a barcode could do the same thing. Yes…it could. If you wrote your barcode scanner poorly. As could any other piece of data entered into any poorly written piece of software. As could any data…even manually entered data.

Netting it out, there is nothing new here. Yes, folks writing software for data entry should take care to parse/filter/detoxify any input. They should be doubly-careful with any data entry that is or could be potentially automated. But this isn’t some new RFID terror- its just old fashioned coding practice.

Maybe one day, when we implant self-aware computers directly into our brains, we’ll have something to worry about on this topic. That day isn’t today.

Technorati Tags: RFID, tinfoil hats

Microsoft has completed the third and final week of their “buzz manufacturing” around something called Origami. As I suspected, the “Origami” isn’t a product that Microsoft is making. Instead, its a new platform spectication- the “Ultra Mobile PC” (UMPC). This isn’t a “Microsoft Only” show…no, their old buddies from Intel are also involved in the specification.

Like the Tablet PC specification, Microsoft has written up some standards. Companies like Asus and Samsung can now build a machine to those standards and call it an “UMPC” (or presumably Origami, but I sort of doubt that will catch on) and, presumably, receive some co-marketing help from Microsoft. But remember- Microsoft themselves aren’t making any kind of new device. And each manufacturer’s “UMPC” will different.

The specification itself isn’t super-amazing. It calls for a 2 pound PC with a 7″ touch panel display, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition OS, and integrated WiFi and Bluetooth. Presumably it will be running some sort of mobile Intel processor and have a smallish hard drive. I didn’t find a lot of “meat” regarding processor, memory, or video specifications. Presumably these will all vary based on manufacturer.

I’m going to put on my prognostication hat once again and guess that Asus and Samsung will ship UMPC devices within three months for $1200 US or thereabouts. These devices will run Pentium M processors, have between 512 MB and 1 GB of RAM, and will have 80 GB hard drives. Video will be probably be some sort of low end ATI or NVidia mobile co-processor, but it won’t be anything remotely high end. Battery life will be about four hours. By the end of the year, no one will remember the name “Origami”…

Technorati Tags: Origami, UMPC, Asus, Samsung, Intel, Microsoft

Microsoft is building some buzz around something called “Origami”. There is a lot of speculation regarding exactly what “Origami” is, including a complete website trying to gather all the information in one place. And at least one guy is writing poetry about the damn thing.

I’m late to the party- really, I don’t know much at all. From skimming the various sites, it sort of sounds like Origami is some sort of “reference platform” like the Microsoft Tablet. Microsoft doesn’t actually build and sell Tablet PCs- they help other companies like Toshiba build the actual machines, and provide an OS and co-marketing effort to help it work. I suppose it could be a for-real Microsoft branded hardware product, but that would be really odd.

Whereas the Tablet PC is basically a laptop with a reversable screen (I.E.: 6 pounds+ of luggable), the Origami prototype devices look more like Sony Playstation Portables (PSPs)- about the size of a PalmPilot. Is it a PDA? It sorta looks like one, but supposedly its not one of those, either. Its a “connected” device, or so it seems- several references to it talk about web browsing and email as primary functions. Its also “multi-media” capable (audio/video), and at least one screenshot seems to be showing someone playing Halo on it. Apparently its OS is some derivative of Windows XP rather than the Pocket PC OS. It also has the ability to capture “written” notes, apparently…akin to a Tablet.

But what exactly *is* the Origami? Apparently, we’ll know more on March 9th. Whether that will give us the full story remains to be seen.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Origami, Hype

About a year ago I bought an Acura TL. I’m very happy with the car, and I suspect I’ll be happy for a number of years. It has all sorts of high-tech gadgetry, and one of the features I have been really looking forward to using is its Bluetooth “Handsfree Link” phone interface.

Basically, the car can be “paired” with an appropriate Bluetooth enabled phone. Once paired, when you start the car and the phone is in range the car will interface to it. You can then use the car’s audio system and voice recognition controls to call out and so forth. Unfortunately, when I bought my car I was still in year two of a three year phone contract with a phone that wasn’t Bluetooth capable.

Not any more. A few days ago I cancelled my old phone (the contract had expired) and went to Bell. There I picked up a Motorola Razr…actually, first I picked up a Samsung a920, which is a great phone with Bluetooth support, but which unfortunately doesn’t want to pair with my TL. I found several web references to folks who couldn’t get the a920 to pair with a TL with varying degrees of failure (I couldn’t get it to pair at all). Before going back to the Bell store to exchange the phone (they have a 15 day no-quibble exchange policy), I found this page in the Acurazine forums. It lists a number of phones and describes exactly which ones work, don’t work/partly work, and which ones have “approval” from Acura (noted in the list with a “#” symbol.

So how does it all work? The outbound audio quality (I.E.: what someone I call hears) is about what you’d expect for a car kit: that is, a bit hollow and slightly “echoey”, but quite usable. The inbound audio (I.E.: what I hear of the call) is first rate: its coming over the TL’s multi-speaker surround sound audio system, so its solid and clear throughout the car. The Razr V3c I have seems to interface “perfectly”- although the Acurazine posting I refer to above indicates that the battery status display in the interface for the phone doesn’t work, with mine its functioning just fine (I.E.: my Acura displays the phone’s battery status). One thing to note is that the voice recognition interface in the Acura TL for the phone has its own dialing directory that is totally independent from any dialing list the phone itself might have. I found that the Acura TL’s phone interface made setting up the my phonebook very quick/easy: its recognition of numbers in particular was very crisp. Basically, I spoke the numbers at a normal speed in a normal tone of voice, and I got 100% recognition for the 10 or so entries I added to the phone list.

And how is the Razr? Its cool- many of the featues it has, particularly the camera and video, are not things I particularly care about in a phone. But it works well, and I’ve had more fun than I expected taking pictures and emailing them directly from the phone. Bell has a $10 a month “option” package that gives unlimited web browsing and unlimited picture mail messages: that makes the built in camera almost useful. Mind you, I can see how sending pictures to everyone could quickly get me into people’s “irritating emailer” books- I’ll have to be a little careful.

Technorati Tags: Acura TL, Razr, Bluetooth, HFL, Hands Free Link