sixtyPercent: Cochlear Implants, Aviation, Technlology, and Philosophy 2006/01
What's going on at Krugle.net
I had the opportunity to visit with Krugle today and look over their currently unannounced product. I'm very impressed! Ken Krugler and the team there have built which I think is a truly useful, innovative new product. It incorporates much of what makes the Internet valuable and interesting, but without being another "me too" / "it's like deli.cio.us meets flickr meets When Harry Met Sally" kind of product.
Look for their announcement in a week at Demo 06.
by David Creemer : 2006/01/31 : Categories technology : 0 trackbacks : 5 comments (permalink)
Home media management requirements
I'm putting together a list of requirements for our home media system. We don't watch any live TV here -- no cable, satellite, roof antenna or even rabbit ears (yes, we're freaks). We do however like to watch movies and let the kids watch a video or two now and then. We also have a pretty big music collection, two iPods, two Mac laptops and a home stereo, and we all like to listen to music -- even (especially) the deaf one. In the hopes of getting some advice from the net, here's the list of requirements and tools:
Must Haves
Nice To Haves
Tools available
Discussion
After some searching, I find that there are several systems available for managing media libraries on Linux. Unfortunately we use Mac's on a daily basis, and I've become use to the clean iTunes interface. I currently have tons of music ripped in a variety of MP3 and AAC formats managed with iTunes on Mac OS X. I'm OK with re-ripping the stuff I want to be lossless, but I'd like to just copy the rest of the data to wherever it needs to be. Since I use the Powerbook laptop every day, it seems to me that is 'has' to be the central management interface. Unfortunately that complicates the picture for lossless encoding, as 100GB is no problem for the server, but not practical on my laptop.
There seem to be several solutions for streaming music, including the slimpserver software I already have running under Linux for the Slimp3. Unfortunately I don't really like to use the slimserver web interface -- especially for music management tasks. It is fine for finding some music or a playlist to play, but not much more (IMHO). There are many, many interfaces to the music player daemon, which can enable remote playing to the stereo via the server or via Icecast2 to the slimp3 player and computers.
For video, I think a simple web interface will do -- freevo and MythTV look nice, but as I've said we don't need a PVR so they seem like overkill. Basic control (start / stop / fast-forward, select file, etc.) is all we need. VLC itself has a Web Interface and there is also other remote control options (such as via my Bluetooth phone or a Dashboard Widget.
Intermediate Setup
Here's what I'm currently thinking for audio: Continuing to use iTunes as my main music management interface. Use rsync to periodically keep the database of music on the server to match that on my laptop. Since it's the path of least resistance, I'll continue to use slimserver for playing music on the stereo and on the second (home-bound) laptop. Both iPods will sync from my laptop.
For video, I'll move the small, quiet PC to the living room, and connect the video output to the TV, and run a remote VLC with a simple custom web interface (or existing free software that I might yet find). Eventually this same box could be made into the audio player too, using one of the soft slimserver clients.
I'm especially interested in suggestions for achieving similar results with fewer parts and things to manage -- the whole project seems overly complex right now...
by David Creemer : 2006/01/31 : Categories music technology (permalink)
Relativector
A common myth has it that the Inuit have 100 different words for "snow" because that's a central feature of their lives. Or that some cultures have words for things like "brother-in-law's sister's daughter" because family connections are important. I live in California's "Silicon Valley" -- what's our word for sister-in-law who is interesting in her blog but when visiting my house sits on my carefully managed Mac and Linux network with her virus-laden bandwidth eating Windows PC?
:-)
by David Creemer : 2006/01/30 : Categories humor : 0 trackbacks : 3 comments (permalink)
A History of God
It has been a few days since my last post, but I have a good excuse: I've been reading. My last few book review posts have concerned novels or memoirs -- easy reading for a winter afternoon. In fact, I have a habit of just sitting down at night and reading those sort of books in one shot. Not so with this post's topic: Karen Armstrong's A History of God. Though it is only about 400 pages long, I spent two weeks taking in this book, and should probably have gone a bit slower.
Why so slow? There are certainly plenty of new words in unfamiliar languages, and I frequently flipped back a few pages or checked the glossary to be sure I understood the topics. But trying to appreciate the meaning of words like kalam or logos or "hesychasm in context or remember who al-Ghazzali'' is was only a small part of what slowed me down. Mostly I just wanted to appreciate every page of what is one of the finest works of non-fiction I've ever read. I'm in no position to judge, but Karen Amstrong must be one of the most skilled writers in her field. (If not, then I can't wait to read the best).
Enough gushing -- here's what blew me away. The book is about the 4000 year evolution of the concept of "God" -- from the beginnings of monotheism to the present day. She traces the rise of various schools of thought in each of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, with some comparisons to Hinduism and Buddhism as well. In each era we learn how successive societies used, adapted, ignored or rebelled against different notions of "God", and the effects the religious thought had on that society (and others).
Growing up in the West, I am aware that the dominant culture has a certain view of "God", and that this view does not dominate worldwide. I am also aware of some of the other spiritual concepts found in other societies. Having read Armstrong's book, I now know what I lacked was a comprehensive context in which to examine these various beliefs, and an understanding of the history of their evolution. Perhaps these concepts are old news to anyone with a couple of "History of Religion" college classes under their belts, but I doubt I could have appreciated this book as much during my undergraduate years.
For instance, I suspected, but could never name or put into context the debate between a personal, "old man in the sky" sort of God versus a more mystical, transcendent concept not so connected to the day-to-day experience. Armstrong charts the history of these debates in all three western Monotheistic traditions. Another striking concept (to me) is due to al-Ghazzali, an 11th century Muslim thinker, who I knew nothing about prior to reading this book. According to Armstrong, al-Ghazzali stated among other things, that some people possess the prophetic spirit, and some do not. In other words and to paraphrase Sartre, some people have "a God-shaped hole" and some do not -- almost like a genetic trait. Looking at spirituality as a genetic predisposition had never occurred to me before, though it seems obvious now.
A History of God was published in 1993 (you read this blog to keep up with the very latest trends, right?) -- and I already have Armstrong's more recent The Battle for God on my night stand. Stay tuned, and I'll let you know how this God character turns out.
by David Creemer : 2006/01/21 : Categories books life : 0 trackbacks : 1 comment (permalink)
GarageBand is Amazing Fun
After purchasing a digital piano and borrowing a friends USB-MIDI interface, I am finally able to spend some quality time with Apple's GarageBand application. This is a very dangerous program in many, many ways.
First of course, it makes it easy to make moderately decent sounding, but ultimately really cheesy music. Here is a sample song that I put together in about three hours of playing around. It sounds to me something like the theme music from an 80's cop show. :-). There are five tracks in this song -- the bass and drums are loops from the Library, slightly altered. I recorded myself playing the rhythm guitar, rhythm synth, and synth flute lead, all played on the keyboard via MIDI. I hope to soon try adding in real (recorded) guitar.
Second, it's a time killer. Much of that time (maybe 2 hours) was spent listening to all of the loops and samples in the library and imagining music to go with the sounds. Listening through headphones, the quality of many of the samples seems to be really good (to me anyway). My piano has 10 built-in samples -- it's really just supposed to be a piano. But when hooked up to the Powerbook with GarageBand I can spend hours playing with the sound library.
When I was considering which keyboards to buy, I decided that I'd focus on nice quality keys, and that's about it -- that's why I got the Casio Privia PX-110. For a few dollars more I can get a good sized library of additional instruments -- through the Mac and GarageBand. After playing with this setup for a few hours it seems to me to have been a good choice. Now I just need to learn something about playing music!
by David Creemer : 2006/01/18 : Categories music : 0 trackbacks : 3 comments (permalink)
Free Starbucks Coffee
Yesterday and today, the network link used to charge my Startbuck's cash card has been down. The kind clerks at the downtown Los Altos Starbuck's are not sure, but they belive that I am not being charged. Is anyone else experiencing this? Time to load up on your triple-venti non-fat caramel soy machiatto's.
by David Creemer : 2006/01/17 : Categories humor : 0 trackbacks : 0 comments (permalink)
Recursion
Here is the entire transcript of one side of a phone call to my wife today:
"Hello? .... Recursion."
And then she hung up. I didn't ask.
Tonight, I get an email from my sister-in-law pointing to her new blog (trendy!), and read this article PHO'N WITH PUNS.
Let's see if she links back here :-).
by David Creemer : 2006/01/16 : Categories life : 0 trackbacks : 3 comments (permalink)
Book Reviews: Ernest K. Gann
I recently completed reading two stories by Ernest K. Gann, who was one of the best aviation writer of the last century.
Fate is the Hunter is the chronicle of his life as a pilot. Gann is an expert story-teller, and lets us ride along with him from the barnstorming days between the wars, to his service as a civilian transport pilot in WW II, and finally through his career as a airline captain. I never tire of learning of the accomplishments of the early flyers and meeting the characters who undertook these challenges, and Gann was probably the best writer who focused on these themes.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery might be regarded as the better writer of this age (and mysteriously disappearing at a relatively young age certainly helped his reputation), but the comparison is really inappropriate in any case -- Saint-Exupery was a writer who was a pilot and drew on those experiences to explore the soul. Gann was a pilot and a writer who explored the limits of the men machines they flew. (OK, well he wrote about sailing too and even the screenplay for the film "Mesada", but now I'm really getting off course, and they were both great writers and you should read all of their books right now, etc.).
A sizable portion of Fate is the Hunter is devoted to the story of a search and rescue operation for a fellow transport crew in the northern reaches of Labrador (now part of Canada). The true life story is amazing enough, but in Island in the Sky Gann converts those events to a novel that is a great single-sitting adventure. I read non-fictional account first, and that feels like the right way to approach this story, as the pacing of the novel doesn't always allow the luxury of slowing down to explain every detail.
The story became a 1953 movie (with John Wayne of course) which I have not yet seen. If you're looking to buy me a gift here's the amazon link :-).
by David Creemer : 2006/01/15 : Categories flying books : 0 trackbacks : 630 comments (permalink)
Some new aviation web sites and hints of the future
Skyvector shows sectional maps, airport information, and METARs in a Google Maps style interactive moving map. Runway Finder is similar.
TFRCheck graphs airspaces, airport information, and current TFRs on a more traditional style "click and zoom" map.
This data, combined with applications like Google Earth are making flight planning certainly a lot more fun, and probably much more complete. In ten years I should be flying with a portable computer that gives me a photo-realistic real-time synthetic view from my current position, or anywhere on my flight plan or alternates. Of course I'll be doing this with an airplane and engine designed in the 1950's...
by David Creemer : 2006/01/14 : Categories flying technology (permalink)
Learning Piano with a Cochlear Implant
While visiting my sister in Dallas recently, I sat down with my son Brendan at her piano. Brendan was plunk-plunking away, so I pointed out some of the patterns on the keys -- two black keys, then three, then two, and so on. Like any little kid, hey kept pecking and banging and seemed to generally enjoy himself. After a few minutes he went from bang-bang-bang to playing simple sequences.
Then I demonstrated a very simple C chord (middle C and E) and noted how nice it sounded. Brendan tried it, did a decent job copying me, then went back to the bang-bang peck-peck. Pretty soon he tried the simple chord again, and to my amazement transposed the chord all the up and down the piano, always hitting the C and E keys in each octave. Mr. Pattern strikes again!
Two things strike me about this: First, Brendan seems to have picked up the pattern of the key layout very quickly, and figured out that the same patterns work in any octave. Second, Brendan is completely deaf and has been since birth. His cochlear implants work so well that many days I simply forget how amazing his hearing can be. I just take it for granted. I'm glad he finds ways to remind me not to do that.
This inspired me to get a piano of our own, and I settled on a Casio PX-110 digital piano. I'm gleefully looking forward to the phone call to arrange for piano lessons: "Hi I'd like to enroll my deaf son in your piano class" :-)
by David Creemer : 2006/01/13 : Categories life music cochlear_implants (permalink)
This goose tried to kill me
I took the kids to the duck pond a while back to feed the birds. It also happens to be located right next to the Palo Alto Airport, and is a great place to watch small planes come and go (but that was a secondary consideration -- really!).
While feeding the ducks, this goose hopped out of the water and tried to kill me to get my bread.
by David Creemer : 2006/01/09 : Categories life : 0 trackbacks : 2 comments (permalink)
I am Finally Rid of Missing Sync
As I've whined about in previous posts I have experienced no end of troubles using Mark/Space's Missing Sync for Palm OS, version 5.
I've regularly seen these problems:
Anyway, I finally managed to free up three hours of time together with my wife to go over her calendar data, week by week, and remove all of the screwed up data. I then completely removed Missing Sync from her iBook, re-installed Palm Desktop and HotSync from Palm, configured Apple iSync to erase all data on her Treo and replace it with the desktop data, cleaned up the conduit list, backed up all her data, crossed my fingers, and hit the Hotsync button on the Treo.
And everything worked perfectly, first time, in about 5 minutes. The second and subsequent syncs have been the usual 30 seconds or so as well. There were tears of joy -- really, I'm not exaggerating. As far as my experiences are concerned, "The Missing Sync" is well named.
by David Creemer : 2006/01/08 : Categories technology : 0 trackbacks : 8 comments (permalink)
Mac and Nokia One Click Syncing
A quick follow up to my previous article on synchronizing contacts and calendar items between my Mac Powerbook and my Nokia 6600 phone. I got one comment, and a follow-up email on the "one click" nature of Hotsync, so I thought I'd mention how I got back to that nice state of affairs.
With a Palm, synchronization starts by pressing the "Hotsync" button, found on the device cable or cradle. You hear a nice sound, the sync runs, and then you hear another nice "all done" sound (and hopefully) not the not-so-nice "there's been an error" sound. With iSync and my Nokia phone, things aren't quite as nice. I have to run the iSync application on my Powerbook, hit the start sync button, then watch the screen for the result. This is far from horrible, but it can be slightly improved. (Note that Mac OS 10.4 "Tiger" is IMHO a slight step backwards -- the iSync menu extra used to initiate a sync with my phone -- now it just initiates a .Mac Sync).
Linked below is a little program (really a very trivial AppleScript) that you can put in your Dock. Click it, it launches iSync, begins the sync, waits, and quits if everything went OK -- just like Hotsync. Also just like Hotsync, it gives nice auditory feedback of the start, end, and error states.
iSync with one Click, like Hotsync script
by David Creemer : 2006/01/06 : Categories technology : 0 trackbacks : 5 comments (permalink)
A Webcam from Downtown Los Altos, California
Here's an experimental webcam from downtown Los Altos, California. The view is from my office, looking at the corner of Main and 3rd Streets. Satura Cakes is visible on the left, and Bank of the West is on the right.
The webcam is running on an ancient Gateway 266MHz Pentium 2, running Ubuntu Linux and a $19 USB webcam. Right now I'm using camserv to stream the images (really just a sequence of JPEGs, but I'm looking into alternatives. Software suggestions are welcome!
by David Creemer : 2006/01/03 : Categories technology : 0 trackbacks : 11 comments (permalink)
How Nokia and Apple replaced my Palm
Once upon a time, I had more time and money than I do now (i.e. I was single). I tried gadget after gadget, searching for things that would make my life better. Of course, this was largely a foolish quest, but wisdom correlates with age, I suppose, and now I'm mostly trying to find ways to get rid of things...
One gadget that generally did simplify my life was my Palm. I used to carry a Palm with me almost everywhere. It was the first product that neatly and simply let me carry my calendar and contacts with me in a nice electronic form, primarily because of the simple design, and of course Hotsync. Push one button and my data is backed up and mirrors on my computer and my Palm -- what could be better?
Well, one thing that could be better would be if every program I use on my desktop or notebook computers also consulted the same calendar and contacts database as my Palm. A while back Apple realized this, and included a nice system-wide Address Book with Mac OS X, and then added a decent calendar application too.
The glue that holds all of this together is iSync -- Mac OS X's answer to Hotsync. iSync collects together structured data (like contacts and calendar events) from a variety of sources, and -- at the touch of a button (where have we read that before?) -- makes sure everything is backed up and in sync.
At first, I used iSync to keep the data on my two Macs (desktop and notebook) in sync. Everything worked so well, that I tossed my cell phone into the mix -- an old Sony Ericsson T610, connecting to my Powerbook via Bluetooth. Again -- perfect! I now had the exact same set of contacts and calendar events on both computers and on my cell phone, and never had a problem, nor found any new complexity. The next step was to add my Palm OS device into the mix. Apple has an answer here too, a sort of "bridge" called the iSync Conduit, that connects Hotsync to iSync.
This "bridged" solution generally works OK -- syncing two macs, a phone and a Palm -- but complexity was certainly increased, and a funny thing started to happen at this point. For every alarm on my calendar, sometimes four devices would start beeping at me! iSync had started to introduce a bit of complexity into my life! While considering this, I also noticed that I generally stopped carrying my Palm. Funny -- since my calendar and contacts were on the phone, I generally didn't need anything else.
Now two years later, I have one less computer (only need the Powerbook now), and have stopped carrying the Palm entirely. The T610 has been replaced with a Nokia 6600 series phone, which runs the Symbian Series 60 (now just S60) OS -- but most people wouldn't care about that. What I do care about is that S60 has a decent calendar, a great address book, and synchronizes with my Mac absolutely flawlessly and painlessly via Bluetooth. The same contact records (including pictures) are used on my phone, email, IM, web forms, address book, calendar, and so on.
My wife is so far sticking with the Palm approach -- though she also values having less to carry and is using a Treo 600 instead of a Palm and a phone. Mostly this works fine, though I forgot my own simplify rule and added complexity by unsucessfully trying to add a 3rd party iSync-Hotsync "bridge" called Missing Sync v5 to her sync mix -- a mistake I have since corrected.
These days, I try to remember that when making a change to a system -- whether it's a life system or a technical one, I should begin and end with asking myself "how can I make this simpler?" and "what can I sensibly remove?" Now if I could only apply this rule to cleaning out the garage ;-)
by David Creemer : 2006/01/03 : Categories technology life : 0 trackbacks : 130 comments (permalink)
