tech
aardvarchaeology | January 16, 2009After a bit less than a month's wait our new house is finally on-line! The winter of our off-line discontent dissolvèd made glorious broadband summer. So far only at 11 Mbps when we were promised at least 12, but the ADSL modem isn't currently on the first phone socket, so I hope to eventually be able to squeeze some more bandwidth out of the setup.
I now face the slight problem of how our desktop machine will interface with the modem in the long term. I was planning on going wireless to eliminate cables, but so far the USB dongle I bought for the purpose isn't working very well. When it…
aardvarchaeology | January 15, 2009Today's the eighth birthday of that excellent open on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Let's all celebrate by going there and contributing some information! Even if it's your first time -- it's easy.
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2008
Today marks Aard's second anniversary. I'm still having fun and hope you are too! Looking at October and November, the blog had about 950 unique readers daily and was ranked #24 out of 74 blogs on Sb. I recently updated the Best of Aard page for those of you who want to check out some past goodies.
For much of these two years I have bragged in the left-hand side-bar that Aard had the highest Technorati rank among the net's archaeology blogs. This is no longer so, and the main reason is that I have stopped hosting blog carnivals. Technorati ranks a blog according to the number and quality of…
stoat | December 17, 2008Perl would be Voodoo - An incomprehensible series of arcane incantations that involve the blood of goats and permanently corrupt your soul. Often used when your boss requires you to do an urgent task at 21:00 on friday night. From If programming languages were religions..., via mt's shared list.
The comments add Fortran and Assembler. I do C nowadays. Matlab and IDL don't get a look in.
stoat | December 15, 2008I have a twitter feed, http://twitter.com/wmconnolley. Quite what its for, I'm not sure. Maybe it will turn out to be useful. Maybe I can embed it into my blog or something. Did I mention that I have a pointless facebook page? Oh look, facebook has a twitter app. It doesn't tell me what it does, and I can't work it out even after adding it, call me a grumpy old technophobe :-(
[Update: more adventures in web2.0 land, in which I'm lost. Thanks to Paul, I worked out how to get my twitter feed onto facebook (somewhat unimpressed to discover that I can only import one feed, so I can't import the…
aardvarchaeology | December 9, 2008
Two weeks ago I left my pocket calendar on my desk at the Academy of Letters where I only work one day a week. This was inconvenient as I rely entirely on the calendar to remember what I'm supposed to do apart from my weekly routine. When I finally got my hands on it again last Thursday, it calmly informed me that I was due to give a talk that same evening.
The mishap made me decide to switch to an on-line calendar instead. I spend hours every day using on-line computers, and my smartphone allows me to call the site up when I'm moving about. So, though the new year is approaching, I'm…
stoat | December 5, 2008mustelid.ning.com. Some kind of social networking thingy. I'm not quite sure what it does. Try visting it.
aardvarchaeology | December 1, 2008"In the morning I left voice mail messages to call me on my mother's and sister's numbers. As I came in to work I saw S still logged in to his Skype account, where he'd left it going for his final exercise round. More subdued phone calls during the day, there would be a viewing at the hospital the next day. I was unfamiliar with the term, but googling confirmed that it was an opportunity to see the body. When had this procedure been (re-)introduced?"
Read more over at Pointless Anecdotes.
aardvarchaeology | November 18, 2008I correspond with a lot of people and my email program remembers them all. Every time I type in the first few letters of an address, Thunderbird suggests a list of people it thinks I might want to write to. The software of course knows nothing about what goes on in the world around it, and so blithely continues to suggest the addresses even of people who have died.
I have heard of ghost email that has been sitting in some screwed-up mail server for months and only reached its adressee after the death of the person who wrote it. But this is something else. My computer wants me to write…
aardvarchaeology | November 14, 2008
I accompanied my son's new class to the Stockholm Museum of Technology today. An investment -- it's good for me to get to know everybody, and it's good for Junior that everybody knows me as a present and available dad.
At the museum, just about the first thing I saw was the XO laptop, about which I've heard so much on Digital Planet. This is the machine developed by the One Laptop Per Child project, known as the "$100 laptop" (though it hasn't quite come down to that yet). Having lugged all 3.6 kilos of my four-year-old Dell Inspiron 6000 through the streets of Lund and Linköping for two…
aardvarchaeology | October 23, 2008
I've been using Garmin's handheld GPS navigators since the spring of 2005; two models running the same firmware. They have been invaluable in archaeological fieldwork, pinpointing finds and test pits swiftly and accurately in situations where you would once have counted steps to the nearest landmark and put an X on a small-scale map. GPS has also helped me a lot when driving, and lured me to seek out over 600 geocaches.
But recently I discovered a really annoying glitch in Garmin's firmware, having to do with the coordinate readout.
The machine is able to use many tens of different…
aardvarchaeology | October 21, 2008After over a year's near-invisibility on the net, cyberculture guru R.U. Sirius resurfaces as editor of H+ Magazine, a web zine about transhumanism. Explains Wikipedia, transhumanism is a "movement supporting the use of science and technology to enhance human mental and physical abilities and aptitudes, and overcome what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death". Shades of R.A. Wilson!
The first issue has loads of interesting content including an interview with hyperclocked science fiction…
aardvarchaeology | September 4, 2008For historical reasons having nothing to do with engineering or rationality, Swedish nuclear power plants dump a lot of warm cooling water into the sea. In a revealing blog entry, Paddy K offers an estimate of just how much energy that cooling water contains.
It's one third of the energy produced in the country.
I suddenly don't feel very motivated to keep my morning showers brief.
[More blog entries about environment, powerproduction, energy, nuclearpower, Sweden; miljö, energi, kärnkraft, energiproduktion.]
stoat | September 2, 2008Just one of an avalanche of tedious blogosphere reactions to google chrome. This afternoon I was reading the comic book (at work, I confess, but I wasn't alone) and now I've downloaded it and this is written in it.
So far I haven't seen any obvious advantages over firefox (other than the porno-viewing mode, of course :-) but I've read what they say and maybe it will become obvious (OK, I have just found one. It allows me to drag this dialogue box I'm typing the text in to become bigger. I like that. I don't think they even bothered to announce it). Its quite blue. I have just set it to be my…
aardvarchaeology | August 28, 2008
A few weeks ago, Kai gave me an interesting book on a subject of which I am almost entirely ignorant: recent military history. Auf den Spuren des "Elbe-Kommandos" Rammjäger by Dietrich Alsdorf (2001) deals with an episode toward the end of the Second World War, the so-called "Sonderkommando Elbe".
Things were grim in the Third Reich in the spring of 1945. Germany had effectively lost control of her own airspace, allowing Allied bomber fleets to operate with murderous efficiency far into Eastern Europe. The Germans had ample numbers of fighter planes and pilots, but hardly any aeroplane fuel…
aardvarchaeology | August 20, 2008
Ever since individual personal computers first came on-line in large numbers, they have been utilised as a huge opt-in distributed computing array by projects such as SETI at Home and Folding at Home.
But there are information processing tasks that can be distributed yet are still impossible to perform with computers. The Stardust at Home project uses the unparalleled image-recognition capabilities of the human brain to process data from an interplanetary sample collection mission. People all around the world take part in their spare time.
Auntie Beeb's weekly program on the worldwide use of…
aardvarchaeology | August 5, 2008
To how many technological civilisations is our galaxy home at this moment? It would be nice to know, so we could estimate our chances of ever coming into contact with somebody out there. In 1961, astronomer Francis Drake suggested a number of parameters relevant to this issue, and summarised them in an equation that bears his name to this day. One of the parameters is the mean life-span of a technological civilisation.
In issue 2008:2 of Skeptic Magazine that reached me today, Michael Shermer has an interesting paper where he states that of Drake's parameters, the mean life-span is actually…
aardvarchaeology | July 25, 2008Here's a cool update on the old Programmer Mel story, a tech-nerdy short story by George Dyson on Google as an emergent AI. It's sort of a fantasy-fulfillment tale for the boomers who seem to make up the bulk of the Edge crowd. This time Mel is named Ed, probably in honour of Ed Nather who wrote the Mel story."By the time Ed turned 65, fifteen billion transistors per second were being produced. Now 68, he had been lured out of retirement when the bidding wars for young engineers (and between them for houses) prompted Google to begin looking for old-timers who already had seven-figure mid-…
aardvarchaeology | June 9, 2008The micro-SD flash memory chip that came with my new smartphone has some interesting issues with data integrity. I mostly use it to store sound files in the mp3 format, both pop songs of a few MB each and podcasts taking up tens of megabytes. And while listening to podcasts, in the middle of them, I have repeatedly come across three interesting and disturbing errors. The flash memory makes psychedelic remixes of my sound files!
As I listen to one mp3 file, I suddenly hear several seconds from another file before the original recording resumes.
As I listen to one mp3 file, I suddenly hear…
aardvarchaeology | May 27, 2008Many people are afraid of cell phones and base stations because they emit radiation. These people tend to know very little about physics, and are generally unaware that daylight through a window on an overcast day is also radiation. Much careful research has turned up no significant health risks with cell phone use or proximity to base stations.
So your mobile handset is unlikely to cause you any harm. But a recent case in the district court of Falun, Sweden, demonstrates that cell phone alarmism is in fact dangerous.
An elderly gentleman who feared cell phone radiation greatly saw his grand-…