Raining Soup

by Stephen Fleming - read more at http://www.academicvc.com and http://www.stephen.fleming.name

My letter to the editor of "New Scientist" magazine

They probably won't publish this, so I'll put it here:

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To the Editors:

The premise of your special on growth in the 15 October 2008 issue is just plain wrong, and the wrongness starts in your lead editorial. http://tinyurl.com/4evh5e

You state that "we live on a planet with finite resources." But we also live in a solar system with eight planets, fifty moons, a million asteroids, a billion comets, and a thermonuclear generator we call the Sun.*

Starting with near-term goals like beaming limitless clean solar power to Earth, and continuing on to longer-term goals such as mining the asteroids, all the resources we need to create wealth for every one of the seven billion people on Earth are right above our heads. Free for the taking.

It doesn't take new technology; those problems were solved forty years ago. It takes leadership and nerve. Both of which appear to be lacking in the Western democracies. Luckily for mankind, other nations on Earth will reject your "no growth" prescription and will develop the untold riches of the solar system. It's a shame that the working language of space will not be English.**

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* Hat tip to Jerry Pournelle.

** Hat tip to Robert Heinlein.

Mac OS X Time Machine advice

Apple's Time Machine has saved my bacon a couple of times.  It's not the only backup strategy I use (I'm trying to store more in the cloud), but it's a darned useful one.

When switching to my new MacBook Pro, syncing up with my ten months of old Time Machine backups got hopelessly confused.  And I had wanted to repartition that external disk anyhow.  So... reformat, and restart Time Machine aimed at an empty disk.

Took forever.

The first 30 gigabytes took over 48 hours to transfer... at the princely data rate of 1.4 megabytes/sec.    And this is over a FireWire 800 cable!  I think a decent DSP can do that rate over a barbed wire fence.

I finally figured out that, even with 4 gigs of RAM, the system was overloaded with other processes (apparently Safari, Java, SpanningSync, and TweetDeck were particularly greedy) and was swapping virtual memory in and out like crazy.  I rebooted, logged in, held down the Shift key to disable startup processes, and left it alone.  The trick is letting Time Machine do its thing unimpeded.

The remaining 170 gigabytes transferred in 2 hours... a much more reasonable 188 megabits per second.  From Activity Monitor, three processes -- Finder, backupd, and mds -- took up essentially all of the CPU time, so refraining from running other programs probably helped.  Page outs and swaps never budged from zero.

If you're frustrated by an agonizingly slow Time Machine initial backup, try it this way.  When you're done, reboot normally, and subsequent incremental backups are speedy indeed. Hope this is useful to somebody...

What if Apple built an alarm clock?

So I'm in a hotel room this morning, planning to sleep late, and I was awakened by the hotel room alarm clock at 7:00 am.  It was dark.  I hadn't set it the night before, so I had no clue as to where the buttons and switches were positioned.  I hammered on the top, I slid switches on the side, I seriously contemplated just smashing the damned thing against the wall, and it finally shut up... but it's a helluva way to awaken.  Then I had to turn on the light to figure out how to actually shut it off rather than just snooze it to come back and torment me in nine minutes.

I've hated alarm clock user interfaces for years.  I don't know why they're so uniformly bad.

I have bought a dozen alarm clocks in pursuit of a decent one.  I currently have an RCA RP3270 at home which is adequate, and certainly better than this hotel room POS, but still frustrating.

What if Apple built an alarm clock?  (I'm assuming that you wouldn't use a multi-touch display for cost reasons; otherwise, just use a stripped-down iPod Touch with an AC plug and no battery.)  

Jonathan Ive could make it a test project for new hires.  Design an alarm clock as if the human being on the other end mattered.  Radio-synchronized to the atomic clock in Boulder; it'd be intentionally hard to override the synched time.  You'd have an intelligent alarm-setting screen that made it obvious if you were setting the alarm for 7:00 am or 7:00 pm... not just a small dot in a random corner of the LED display.  You'd have an iPod scroll wheel on the top that let you move the time forward and backwards easily and intuitively.  Once things were set, you'd have gently glowing buttons on the top... yellow for "snooze" and red for "OK, I'm up now."  An iPhone charging dock, since you need to charge iPhones every night... and you could use the iPod functions to set your wake-up music.  And so forth.  

And it would cost $99.  And, you know what?  It would be worth it!

MacBook RAM

Haven't seen anybody talking about it yet, but apparently the new MacBook/MacBook Pro have followed the lead of the MacBook Air, and there is no user-upgradeable RAM. That's a shame.

In the world of bloated code, I guess I will have to be satisfied with 4 GB of RAM. HP and Dell will both sell me a notebook with 8 GB. That's sad.

(And I know that even 4 GB of RAM in a laptop is ridiculous, but I keep hitting the 2 GB limit on my current MacBook Pro, and it seems silly to just double it on a new machine that should last me for a couple of years. I'd rather start at 8 GB with the option to move to 16 GB later.)

IPhone Typos

The key to typing quickly on the iPhone is to trust the autocorrect. I'm faster on this slab of glass than I was on my beloved Treo keyboard.

But sometimes the autocorrect guesses wrong. Unless I get involved in the Christmas tree business, I'm unlikely to ever type the word 'fir.'. But I type 'for' all the time.

And I can't imagine ever needing to type 'incest,' but the iPhone picks that over 'invest.'

I wish there were a way to edit the dictionary.

Stephen

-- Please excuse brevity. Typed with one finger on a sheet of glass.