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

I mentioned in one of my gallery photo entries that I sometimes take pictures of ships so I can research them later on. Actually, this is something I can’t really call a “passion” or a “hobby”: I’ve checked into ship backgrounds a couple of times, and found it kind of interesting.

The first time I did this, I didn’t have a photo to work from. My wife and I were staying downtown at the Fairmont Waterfront one night as a special treat. Right outside the front door of the hotel is the Canada Place cruise terminal, and docked next to it was an unusual looking ship with what looked to me to be some sort of robotic submarine on its deck. The ship also had a Christmas tree on its deck, and that also intrigued me. I tried to memorize its name…Maersk something. Maybe Maersk Defender?

How does a fragmented name turn into real information on the ship? Read on…

Technorati Tags: Googling, Internet, Maersk Defender, Ship chasing

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I was reading Discover magazine today and found an article about the New Horizons project. Basically, its a robotic exploration craft being sent to Pluto to gather some close-in data on the 9th planet. If you want to see some insider photos of the New Horizons craft and its launch, you can check out this photo library on Flickr.

The science is interesting, but what is more intriguing to me is the story behind the mission. There have been several aborted attempts to get a mission to Pluto under way, but the cost and time scales have always been daunting. The current mission really started in 1989 when an “underground” group of scientists started meeting and working together to keep pushing for the exploration. One scientist in particular, at least according to the article, who remained enthusiastic from the start was Dr. Alan Stern.

I look at things I do every day and how little patience I have. Then I look at the New Horizons project, and Alan Stern, and I am forced to rethink how serious I am about things. Here’s a guy who started working back in 1989 to get a project launched, who more or less gave up three years of his life once the project was approved in 2003 in order to get the craft launched. And he won’t see the results from all this effort until 2015 when, in a mere 24 hours, almost all the science he’s worked towards will either succeed or fail.

Its folks like Alan Stern, and there are thousands like him, who really make science work. The focus, the effort, the dreams…all over periods of years and decades. The knowledge they gain in these efforts is hard for most of us to really understand, and sometimes its tough to see how one individual piece of work can be worth it. Yet without folks like this, the boundaries of science would be far less expansive.

I’ll try to keep the New Horizons project in mind as an example the next time I start feeling disappointed by how little progress something I’m working on seems to be making. Maybe it won’t keep me going back to the piano to practice, or incent me to get back on the exercise bike…but it will remind me that sometimes it takes a real commitment to get the reward.

Technorati Tags: Alan Stern, New Horizons, Pluto

I was reading today about a new study that shows that rats infected with toxoplasma parasites are “controlled” by the parasite to perform acts beneficial to it. Some of these acts are decidedly suicidal for the poor rat, unfortunately, like being attracted to the smell of cat urine.

Toxoplasma has two basic life stages: their sexual stage can only take place in a cat, the asexual part of their life can take place in any mammal. So, if Toxoplasma wants to reproduce, it needs to get inside a cat. With rats, it does this by short-circuiting a key rat survival instinct- the one that keeps them away from areas where cat urine can be smelled. The cat eats the infected rat, the parasite gets to have sex, and everyone is happy…well, except maybe for the rat.

The exact mechanisms that the toxoplasma gondii protozoa uses to achieve this result are not yet understood. It also isn’t determined yet whether the parasite has any real impact on adult humans who might happen to pick it up. It is known, however, that a pregnant woman who picks up the bacteria will have a higher probability of giving birth to a child with schizophrenia…along with other problems like hydrocephalus and spontaneous abortion.

Its also known that about 15% of people in the United States show signs of having been infected with Toxoplasma parasites…and about 50% of people world wide (88% in France…I wonder what the French are up to?). The question is: are some mental disorders in humans caused by this parasite? Is the legendary French arrogance simply a result of the parasite trying to get citizens of France eaten by giant cats? Science may one day soon answer this and other pressing questions…

Humour aside, the ability of a simple parasite to selectively alter deep-seated mental behaviors for its own benefit is intriguing to say the least.

Technorati Tags: toxoplasma, schizophrenia, parasites, mind control

Steve Fossett, a millionaire who likes to break records, has successfully completed a flight setting a new world record for solo non-stop distance. His plane, the GlobalFlyer, was designed and built by Scaled Composites, the same folks who designed and built the first privately funded “space ship”, SpaceShipOne.

The flight itself must have been a bit scary. It started with a loss of something like 700 gallons of fuel. It continued through the fact that an environmental control problem raised the cabin temperature in the plane to over 130 degrees. And it ended when a generator on board the GlobalFlyer failed shortly before the scheduled landing, forcing an early emergency landing. Despite this, the record was set, and the designs of ScaledComposites got some additional well-deserved publicity.

An interesting fact about the GlobalFlyer aircraft. Apparently, it is so aerodynamically “perfect” for sustained flight that the only way to get it to land is to deploy parachutes. Neat…

Technorati Tags: Scaled Composites, Global Flyer, Steve Fossett, flight

Hello, my name is Kelly Adams….and I’m a searchaholic.

I like to Google. Google is my friend. Well, most of the time its my friend. Until, that is, I search for myself on the vast frontier land that is the Internet. Go ahead, try it yourself: search for “Kelly Adams” (use the quotes). You won’t find my presence on the web on page one…or page two…or even page five. In those first few pages, you’ll discover an actress named Kelly Adams and some fan sites for her, a couple of authors of pornography with the name “Kelly Adams”, and some other sites I just don’t have the time to look at. But my site is somewhere in the Google results: keep looking…on page 12 or so. Now try uber geek “Kelly Adams”. There I am, page one. Or “Kelly’s World”: there my site is again, page one.

I don’t mind being considered an “uber geek”: I’m proud of my nerdiness. And maybe I belong on page 12 due to popularity? Well, let’s have some more fun with Google. Try searching for “Teresa Noreen”. You’ll find my web site on page one, maybe page two.

Waitaminnit….my site is *entirely* about Kelly Adams. Its who I am. I’ve mentioned Teresa a few times, and she’s a wonderful person…but if you are looking for “Kelly Adams”, you should find my site somewhere more prominently than page twelve versus page two for someone who happens to be mentioned on my site. I’m not trying to misrepresent my site at all: in fact, I’m trying to get the search engines to recognize what its about a bit more intelligently.

So, what to do? Meta-tags, at least the ones originally designed for search engine use (E.G.: the “keywords” tag) are pretty much useless. All the major search engines pretty much ignore them. And my current challenge isn’t about Google page rank: improving that is largely going to happen based on me having interesting content and other folks “rewarding” that content by mentioning me in their sites. And I’m really not wanting to get into the whole “search engine optimization” thing: folks write books and teach courses about it, and what it all seems to boil down to is people claiming to have a “trick” to jigger the system…that’s not what I want.

The best advice I have been able to find suggests that the thing to change is the “title” meta tag. A cool website name is great, but if the title also says what your site is about, it serves double duty. And its a key part of how the search engines index a site.

So, my site’s title has now changed. Its a bit long (”Kelly’s World- A View into the mind of Uber Geek, Kelly Adams”), but hopefully sometime in the next few months typing “Kelly Adams” into Google will show my site somewhere in the first five pages at least.

UPDATE: Google has apparently already updated their indexes; do a Google Search on “Kelly Adams”…this site is (as of this moment) on page one, 7th item down. Hurray!

Technorati Tags: Google, Search engines, Title tag

I really do like my little Linksys storage link. But I’ve run into a problem with it that is perplexing.

One of the reasons I got the NSL was to facilitate backups of my various machines. And sort of “key” to that backup strategy is being able to preserve files from my Linux server (the one you are connected to now). The NSL natively supports SMB (server message block) file shares: for this to work with Linux, you have to install a client that supports SMB file system mounts. Samba is the package I selected, and its pretty much the defacto standard. And it works: my Linux box can connect to my NSL and copy files to and fro without difficulty.

Where the problem comes is with large files…files greater than 2 gigabytes in size. That’s pretty much the minimum size for a backup (tar) file in this day and age. What happens is that writing to a file on the NSL from my Linux box fails as soon as the file reaches 2 gigabytes. This is not good…

Some of the places I checked said that this was a problem with the operating system on the Linksys NSL when it was first released. The proble was corrected somewhere around firmware release V2.3R29. I have V2.3R63, and I can confirm that, from Windows at least, I can create files larger than 2 gigabytes in size on an NSL hosted share. Since both Windows and Samba use SMB for file shares on the NSL, it seems that the problem I’m experiencing resides not in the Linksys box, but in my Linux version. This seems to be supported by some of the content on the NSLU2-Linux wiki…although like most Wiki’s, its sometimes a bit unclear. This is the text from that Wiki entry that seems to support my current theory:

The 2GB limit seems to be gone

I know that more recent versions of smbfs no longer have a 2GB limit. I tested with my Gentoo linux box, mounting the NSLU2 share with the ‘lfs’ option, which gets passed to smbmount. I was able to successfully transfer a 40 GB file to the slug (cat /dev/hda > /nslu2/share/big_file.dat). Could’ve done more, but that took all night as it was. Anyway, the version of samba that came with my slug seems to no longer have this limit. I’m using Samba 3.0.14 and Linux kernel version 2.6.12 on my Gentoo box. Earlier versions probably work as well. Also, the CIFS driver in the newer Linux kernel does not have that limit either, but for me, it seemed to have stability issues, though it is much faster than the older smbfs module.

What I don’t know is exactly why my Linux box still has this limit. I have Mandrake version 10.0, with kernel version 2.6.3-7 and Samba client 3.1. I do have a long term plan to move to RedHat Fedora Core (probably), but…not today.

Technorati Tags: NSLU2, Linux, Samba, SMB, Network Storage

Voice over IP is so last year. Now companies are looking at delivering television and movies to your home over the Internet. And MatrixStream has hardware and software they hope will make it happen. This posting isn’t a review, really: I don’t have the hardware product, and the software product is still in beta and is rather lacking in available content. Consider this more of a “preview”…or maybe a “watch this space for future developments” type of posting.

Delivering video over the Internet really isn’t a “new” thing. But trying to deliver subscriber TV (think cable television) over the Internet *is* new. There are a bunch of challenges to making it happen.

Firstly, there is the matter of bandwidth: HDTV requires something on the order of 10 Mbps if you want to watch it in “real time”. You can get around this by downloading the video before you want to watch it, or by using novel forms of compression to try to squeeze a bit more out of your not-so-uber 1.5 Mbps ADSL. MatrixStream claims to provide live TV content over any Internet connection of 1.5 Mbps or better. They are a little less clear in their documentation regarding exactly what quality of TV you’ll get at 1.5 Mbps. Live “plain old TV quality” can stream at that rate, true- I saw this with the MatrixStream IMX player. I’m pretty sure, though, that you won’t get live HDTV over a 1.5 Mbps link and, from the sample streams they had available via Movie99 (you can download and try out the client and current selection of content if you like ), my belief seems to be born out. So…don’t expect live HDTV quality TV over your 1.5 Mbps network connection. I was able to get a couple of the channels at HDTV 720p, but the playback was a bit choppy at times- not really bad, but not as good as my HDTV DVR. And I have 3 Mbps ADSL, a PC with 2 GB of RAM and a 256 MB ATI X800 video card- not exactly a low end config. Netting it out, I’d say MatrixStream’s PC client provides better quality streaming over my available Internet bandwidth than (for example) Windows Media Player, but I’m not sure it is quite as good as my dedicated digital cable set top box.

Secondly, there is the matter of content: television and cable providers are all set up for delivery via traditional satellite and cable…they aren’t really ready yet to deliver their content over the Internet. Movie99 (see link above) is sort of the “sample” provider that MatrixStream points folks to. Their list of available (for free) content is …well, to put it politely, ecclectic. If you want to watch the Japanese version of Iron Chef, or Vatican TV, or a the Australian Christian Channel, you are in business. But don’t expect network TV- this is really a tech demo.

What about the set top box? I don’t have one, so I took a look at their demonstration video. Its a Windows Media video showing a TV screen and the MatrixStream set top box, as someone goes flips through a few programs. If you want to watch it, I suggest you right click the above link and save it to your hard drive, then play it back from there. Calling a look at this video a “review” is sort of like saying watching an Ebert and Roeper review is like actually seeing a movie…but its what I have to work with. Eyeballing the video, the playback quality looks similar to what I saw with their PC client on my home computer. You can see the same occasional bit of “choppyness” with the HD playback of the concert scene (which can be found on Movie99) . One thing I’m not sure about regarding the MatrixStream set to box: it has a hard drive, but is it set up to do timeshifting and series recording like a DVR or Tivo? Or is that hard drive just for stream caching or minimal “pay per view” video on demand recording? I’d think the latter, which is a shame.

Netting it out, it looks like MatrixStream has a good set of technology. They support a broad range of streaming codecs, notably AVC (also known as MPEG4 Part 10, or ITU-T H.264) and Windows Media 9. If they can find content partners comparable to those available through major cable providers, I can see people choosing either the MatrixStream PC or set top client as an alternative to getting an HD DVR like my Motorola DCT6400. My DCT occasionally has some playback artifacting itself: the MatrixStream PC player was a bit worse in this regard when I tried it, but its a beta product- the “hiccupy” playback could be something that will be corrected.

Now that I know about MatrixStream, I’ll be watching them to see how their product progresses. The set top box is supposedly going to be available to consumers during the first half of 2006.

There have been recent news stories about how some Internet service providers are going to put an end to the “free ride” all of us consumers are getting. Various news outlets have picked up on this phrase, as if its actually true or accurate.

In fact, its the worst possible example of misleading and downright untruthful spindoctoring I’ve read in recent times. Tell me, visitor to my site: do you not pay a monthly fee for Internet service? Now, I’m going to guess that its probably not cheap, either: compared to, for example, your phone.

But wait, home users aren’t the only ones paying for the service. No sir. Every website you connect to is paying for Internet access as well, and big commercial sites are paying tremendous amounts for monthly bandwidth. A big bandwidth user like Google is probably paying on the order of millions of dollars a month for bandwidth. Game providers like EverQuest are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.

But some hopped-up suit with a $5 million a year salary has the weighty brass ones to tell us that we are getting a “free ride” for our Internet use? I cry “bullshit”. AT&T, Bell, Telus and the rest are desperately trying to screw us out of another few billion a year, to not just double-charge for the bandwidth, but *triple charge*.

Perhaps their distribution mechanisms for the revenue aren’t working well: maybe the companies that host Google are the one’s raking in the cash, and the local ISPs aren’t being fairly compensated. They do have a revenue distribution model, and maybe it would take some actual work to make it work correctly. But that isn’t a reason to tell us all to bend over and take it like we want it.

The real problem here is this. The telcos see people making a lot more money off the bandwidth selling services and such, money that they think they should be getting. They want to sell a commodity (bandwidth) using a pay for value approach, but the telcos have nothing of value to sell other than the bandwidth itself. They don’t have the videos, or the search results, or the computer games: but they want to charge you and I and the vendors of those services as if *they* owned the content.

It would be as if the natural gas company saw that you were making huge profits making pizzas with their gas, and wanted a share of the pizza profits. And the approach they are taking smacks of thuggism and mafiaosa tactics to me.

Telcos to home owners
“Well, Mr. Home owner, we know you like your high speed internet access. It would be a real shame if it got a lot slower, you know, because of how priorities get set and so forth. But we could watch out for you, make sure that content you want gets safely to your house…prevent those little accidents, you know?”

Telcos to content providers
“Ah, Mr Google/Sony/Apple iTunes, I see you have a healthy little business here. Everything going well, you’ve got your customers all lined up, and I see you have some nice product. Some really nice product. Now, you pay us several hundred thousand a month to deliver that product. We look after you good, yes we do. But what a shame it would be if, and I’m speaking hypothetically here, that product of yours got…lost. We have so much product to deal with, you know? Its kinda hard to keep track, and things get misplaced when everything starts to look sorta the same. Yeah, that would be a shame, now wouldn’t it? But I think maybe we could avoid that problem….”

Personally, I think the reporters and news services should be putting some actual thought into how they report on this, and the legislators had bloody well better put the hammer down on the telcos.

Technorati Tags: Free ride, Bell, Telus, ISP

I’ve started on my 2006 computer upgrade process. The first thing I wanted to get done was to set up network storage for backup and file sharing on my home network. I’m forever rebuilding computers, so anything that looks like a full-blooded computer ends up disconnected or “changed” too often. So I decided some months ago that I’d get a dedicated “network storage” device.

What I settled on is the Linksys Network Storage Link (NSLU2). Like most of these devices, it has a processor, a network interface, and a couple of USB 2.0 ports on the back to hook up USB- based hard drives. It doesn’t have any storage of its own- some of the others do.

The NSL intrigued me for several reasons, not the least of which is that inside this little box is a Linux based computer. This means there are all sorts of people playing with the innards of the box and hacking it to do different things. Its also tiny and kind of cute:

Yep, that’s my hand beside it there. The drives I attached to it are each about the same physical size: I stacked them under the NSL- they connect up with a standard USB cable, so there is some flexibility there. Configuring the NSL is a breeze and, contrary to the included documentation, you can attach and access FAT/NTFS formatted drives, but only if you upgrade to the latest firmware. With the old firmware, any drive you attached had to be formatted with a Linux file system, EXT3: you still need a drive formatted this way if you want access to some of the NSL’s features like users, groups, and dedicated shares/mount points.

The NSL basically looks like a Windows based computer on your network with some file shares available. Performance is about what you’d expect for a network based drive: somewhat under 10 MBps (megabytes per second) which, if you do the math, means its pumping data about as fast as you conceivably can on a 100 Mbps (megabit per second) Ethernet LAN. I haven’t experimented much with security, but you can create users and private shares on the device, assuming you have at least one EXT3 formatted hard drive.

The two drives I attached are pretty ordinary: one is a “no-name” 250 GB USB 2.0 drive I picked up at Best Buy for $249, the other is a 300 GB HP drive Irene bought for me at London Drugs for $349. The HP drive is somewhat better built- cast aluminum chassis instead of pressed aluminum, and it has a tiny 1 cm fan in the back for cooling. Its a bit amazing to realize I have over half a terabyte of storage attached to this configuration. That translates into 275,000,000 written pages of text, about 600 hours of DVD quality video, or two copies of the latest EverQuest 2 update…

Technorati Tags: Linksys, Network Storage, NSLU2