tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-176057472024-03-06T23:52:10.894-08:00the john reportmy name is john - and this is my reportAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.comBlogger56125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-72651559078331021132011-06-16T17:19:00.005-07:002011-06-16T17:28:44.290-07:00take a standAlthough I've seen several <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_desk">standing desk </a>arrangements around the office over the last several years, some recent post I saw about the possible health benefits renewed my interest enough to try it for myself. Before making any drastic changes to furniture at the office, I decided to jury-rig something in my home office and try it out for two days whilst working from home. Ah, Rubbermaid containers - is there anything you can't do?<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKMB_tUFkzOgzIfAY0HHfCYH8XtZuR4k-4NFGUcpOF6IHpjU8I-Y7sRmu5ePxfAz0NXu9ESG266YUafHKFEp3AMBbPdFMYG8B99ylFWoXPWrhx9dCbGcE4l8dm_YSGVecPjxSV/s1600/Photo1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKMB_tUFkzOgzIfAY0HHfCYH8XtZuR4k-4NFGUcpOF6IHpjU8I-Y7sRmu5ePxfAz0NXu9ESG266YUafHKFEp3AMBbPdFMYG8B99ylFWoXPWrhx9dCbGcE4l8dm_YSGVecPjxSV/s320/Photo1.jpg" width="239" /></a></div><br />
<br />
After two days of trying this arrangement, I've learned the following:<br />
<br />
<ul><li>All the firsthand accounts I read of people trying a standing desk arrangement for the first time are true: you do feel more alert later in the day, but your feet will hurt for at least the first few days!</li>
<li>Alternating between standing and sitting works best for me - so far, a ratio of 90% standing and 10% sitting every hour seems to work best. </li>
</ul><br />
Bottom line: worth continuing my experiment and rearranging my workstation at the office. I'll follow up with a future posting describing my experience with a standing desk over a month or so. In the meantime, have you some links with more info!<br />
<br />
[HBR] The Many Benefits of Standing at Your Desk<br />
<a href="http://blogs.hbr.org/your-health-at-work/2010/08/the-many-benefits-of-standing.html">http://blogs.hbr.org/your-health-at-work/2010/08/the-many-benefits-of-standing.html</a><br />
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[Smarterware] Why and How I Switched to a Standing Desk<br />
<a href="http://smarterware.org/7102/how-and-why-i-switched-to-a-standing-desk#">http://smarterware.org/7102/how-and-why-i-switched-to-a-standing-desk#</a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-10387304625766316852009-09-06T07:56:00.002-07:002011-06-12T17:19:53.014-07:00mount usb disks using by-labelWhen the screen on my old family laptop died a few years ago, I found the perfect use for it: as a headless server on the family network. Running <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/products/WhatIsUbuntu/serveredition">Ubuntu 9.04 Server</a>, this laptop primarily acts as a file server on the network, dishing out bits to a wide variety of clients (Mac, PC, iPod Touch and an Xbox 360). The internal hard drive is relatively small, and pretty much used only as the system drive; an external 500 GB USB drive holds data, and I recently added a second 1 TB USB drive to give the growing bit collection some much needed breathing room.<br />
<br />
<div></div><div>The addition of the second USB drive, however, has exacerbated an annoyance that I've suffered since setting this system up: the challenge of configuring consistent mount points. The USB drives appear as SCSI drives to Ubuntu, and therefore show up as <span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">/dev/sd*</span> in the /dev hierarchy. Although Ubuntu magically handles recognition of the drives as they are plugged in or unplugged from the server, the drives don't consistently show up as a particular <span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">sd*</span> device. I don't often unplug these drives, but when I do and then plug them back in (or when the system has been restarted), I have to hunt around the <span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">/dev</span> directory, find the correct <span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">sd*</span> device, and then manually mount the drive. With one drive, I could easily tell which <span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">sd*</span> device had just been added to the system: with two, it became troublesome enough that I searched for some better way to handle my USB drives.<br />
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<a name='more'></a></div><div>Luckily, I quickly stumbled on this <a href="http://www.debian-resources.org/node/9">howto article</a> describing a hierarchy under <span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">/dev</span> that I've never explored before: <span style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">/dev/disk</span> (argh!). In a nutshell, labels and other identifiers associated with filesystems on attached drives can be used to consistently reference those drive and mount them. Better yet, I discovered that the volume label on my FAT32 drives was automatically recognized, making the mounting operation as simple as shown by the example below:</div><div><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">mount/dev/disk/by-label/jukebox/mnt/jukebox</span></blockquote>Since the drives can be referenced in a consistent manner, I've *finally* been able to add them in fstab, making mount and umount operations *much* easier to deal with! </div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-64071646007806169722009-08-28T22:18:00.005-07:002011-06-12T17:26:29.370-07:00HN reader survey results<div>UPDATE: the charts below are smaller than I'd like, so I've posted full-sized versions in a <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/john.vangorp/HNSurveyResultsAugust2009#">Picasa Web Album</a> if you'd prefer to view something larger.<br />
<br />
I've been a fan of the <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/">Hacker News</a> aggregation web site ever since I discovered it, and I was intrigued by the <a href="http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dEhmQ0JYLXE2M2ZJU05jZU0xWHFBS0E6MA..">quick survey</a> that Dave Lyon posted to HN in order to gather data for a class in machine learning algorithms. In a little more than a day, Dave collected more than 2000 responses, and <a href="http://davelyon.net/mldata.html">posted a page</a> pointing to the data collected. Jon von Gillem noticed that the standard charts generated by the Google Spreadsheets survey were fairly simplistic, and <a href="http://www.vonsharp.net/HNSurveyCharts.aspx">crunched the data</a> to squeeze out some histogram and scatter plot goodness.<br />
<br />
</div><div></div><div>I've started learning more about <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">R</a> recently, and since I learn best by doing, I decided to take a crack at analyzing the data using R. I quickly abandoned the standard plotting package in favour of the excellent <a href="http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/">ggplot2</a> package by <a href="http://had.co.nz/">Hadley Wickham</a>, which made even the somewhat complex colour scatter plots below easy to generate. Before crunching the data, I removed some of the more "suspect" submissions, and in the end decided to remove submissions with reported income > $200k to better highlight the majority of submissions in the scatter plots below.</div><div><br />
<a name='more'></a>The following histograms provide a more detailed profile of HN survey participants by age, income, years in their industry, and hours worked each week. I find the age histogram particularly depressing, as I'm definitely in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail">long tail</a> of the chart. I wonder why there are so few older geeks? Perhaps we disappear in some <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(1976_film)">Logan's Run</a>-esque fashion?<br />
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</div><div></div><div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio1aGhqBMu3eRKjylEmwr3RBYba94pITjxRzOhLQz8bazrntqGRrszPgomhSrzGU9bZ_AmKLBB1XFKsCmKIk6Yd1sUDYHEGF8c3mX1WkEEVucQ-dznVPLQ8z8CIsU4dxiGstTvcQ/s1600-h/HN-histogram-age-640x480.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio1aGhqBMu3eRKjylEmwr3RBYba94pITjxRzOhLQz8bazrntqGRrszPgomhSrzGU9bZ_AmKLBB1XFKsCmKIk6Yd1sUDYHEGF8c3mX1WkEEVucQ-dznVPLQ8z8CIsU4dxiGstTvcQ/s400/HN-histogram-age-640x480.png" /></a></div><div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHiupiX1rIF2oIXokIpzm8GqvOetiDdsd4NzHPw1-PBh041lmgBN2dZ30Cvuw1XocrAuRaHWxUjCD-hsqghP1f8kcFmkAKI4AMS4akODxJhMFaNrizlu5o4vgA_-xjCpVlbERQow/s1600-h/HN-histogram-income-640x480.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHiupiX1rIF2oIXokIpzm8GqvOetiDdsd4NzHPw1-PBh041lmgBN2dZ30Cvuw1XocrAuRaHWxUjCD-hsqghP1f8kcFmkAKI4AMS4akODxJhMFaNrizlu5o4vgA_-xjCpVlbERQow/s400/HN-histogram-income-640x480.png" /></a></div><div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAgYbjeR-wjTdOJz3S0XaD1QB05WMdXzHEb9Eq-SX06hK4gMMo-gDjBgW9m9CA9uF1Z1S6eeQJTWiP8jG8_kPPjvOPuuZddruHFOtHidBfg1SWs0P7NU0r-snXUlFbI9RICNpqVw/s1600-h/HN-histogram-industry-years-640x480.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAgYbjeR-wjTdOJz3S0XaD1QB05WMdXzHEb9Eq-SX06hK4gMMo-gDjBgW9m9CA9uF1Z1S6eeQJTWiP8jG8_kPPjvOPuuZddruHFOtHidBfg1SWs0P7NU0r-snXUlFbI9RICNpqVw/s400/HN-histogram-industry-years-640x480.png" /></a></div><div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisaGKCzn8J_w0O_kU42wghVf-LPdWkKbJ_nO32dhxqZtODW0dK2n_EhDwxddqVp_pKWgfxmPol_mDdrP7G5326cZy0DtauAJMhQ7qL7QJb3_B6yvH0KceIOPO_BznFqmUo_zdz7Q/s1600-h/HN-histogram-work-hours-640x480.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisaGKCzn8J_w0O_kU42wghVf-LPdWkKbJ_nO32dhxqZtODW0dK2n_EhDwxddqVp_pKWgfxmPol_mDdrP7G5326cZy0DtauAJMhQ7qL7QJb3_B6yvH0KceIOPO_BznFqmUo_zdz7Q/s400/HN-histogram-work-hours-640x480.png" /></a></div><div></div><div><br />
I was curious to see what relationship there might be between some of the variables captured by the survey, and decided to test how income and hours worked each week. The scatter plot below does suggest that those working 20 hours or less during the week earn less than those working more hours in the week, but working more than 40 hours a week doesn't appear to dramatically increase income.<br />
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</div><div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmRBXxhlMnf75QWvT_7FQ607fY64pQiW00YEkwgEGNx5hCmlttjTgQxa25kTCh8sykwi6EUtdbGKBHw9wxRvTHjwzCYZ5YPcXpVTg5uXMe2bb9vi7nikYj14d7vCmce5SKZ8Pthg/s1600-h/HN-scatter-workhours-640x480.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmRBXxhlMnf75QWvT_7FQ607fY64pQiW00YEkwgEGNx5hCmlttjTgQxa25kTCh8sykwi6EUtdbGKBHw9wxRvTHjwzCYZ5YPcXpVTg5uXMe2bb9vi7nikYj14d7vCmce5SKZ8Pthg/s400/HN-scatter-workhours-640x480.png" /></a></div><div></div><div><br />
I also wanted to test the relationship between age and income, but group the data by factors such as education and type of employment to see what impact such factors had. I used the spiffy capabilities of ggplot2 to quickly generate the two scatter plots below. To my (admittedly aging) eyes, no patterns immediately jump out - perhaps generating separate scatter plots by the factor elements would help highlight any patterns that may exist.<br />
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</div><div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWyKeZ3EWjMKfo1tJf9M3yDeCNBvVmwC6rzEXL8uBo94fgIRDXo9lyZLJTUdPF-CxgSybnG0Vwh6bUgS2U_sGZUwaP_-_q_INUoZwnsYqGtHmYsdJ00o-xwAp3oLyYDVij_jANLQ/s1600-h/HN-scatter-education-640x480.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWyKeZ3EWjMKfo1tJf9M3yDeCNBvVmwC6rzEXL8uBo94fgIRDXo9lyZLJTUdPF-CxgSybnG0Vwh6bUgS2U_sGZUwaP_-_q_INUoZwnsYqGtHmYsdJ00o-xwAp3oLyYDVij_jANLQ/s400/HN-scatter-education-640x480.png" /></a></div><div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqoDHSSlaaduoaSGzOMugkLzXuYsfaOMv7wps-540E0_4VMXBnPw59UylUKBjkLhoGO7uo3H7a3S3a5r-zh9F0bAzFU_SMPqQF2k54u0THtSvmQGhxJslwP8V1D6OFCezA0ry3FA/s1600-h/HN-scatter-employment-640x480.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqoDHSSlaaduoaSGzOMugkLzXuYsfaOMv7wps-540E0_4VMXBnPw59UylUKBjkLhoGO7uo3H7a3S3a5r-zh9F0bAzFU_SMPqQF2k54u0THtSvmQGhxJslwP8V1D6OFCezA0ry3FA/s400/HN-scatter-employment-640x480.png" /></a></div><div></div><div><br />
I've made available the <a href="http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Amqvj2y3dZcVdDNxV0NrM2RJNHhzaEo5YXJ5ZHNfbXc&hl=en">survey results data</a> (filtered to remove both suspect entries and entries with income > $200k) that I used in my analysis if anyone is interested in crunching the data themselves. If you do find something interesting, be sure to drop a note in a comment to this post!</div><span style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><br />
</span></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-18840700937623951812008-05-25T15:55:00.004-07:002008-05-25T16:14:50.967-07:00cmd key confusion<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://images.apple.com/support/_images/hero_powerbookg4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://images.apple.com/support/_images/hero_powerbookg4.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />When I picked up an old <a href="http://support.apple.com/specs/powerbook/PowerBook_G4_12-inch_DVI.html">12" PowerBook G4</a> last fall (just in time for the launch of Leopard!) I wondered how long it would take to become familiar enough with keyboard shortcuts under OS X such that they'd become reflex actions. Not long at all, as it turns out - especially once I worked out that the Command key on a Mac is similar in concept to the Windows key on a PC.<br /><br />After several months of switching between Windows PC (at work) and a Mac (at home), I find the daily transition fairly seamless - with one exception. I use keyboard shortcuts fairly often when browsing, especially to jump to the browser Search and Address fields. Jumping to the Address field in Safari is Cmd-L, so after an evening of web surfing I find the first thing I do the next day at work on my Windows PC is hit the Windows-L key combination - which logs me out. It's been months now, and I <span style="font-weight: bold;">still </span>do this every two or three days! Argh!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-72811948008362253752008-05-18T15:42:00.006-07:002008-05-18T16:07:36.356-07:00ted, this case is closedI've been excited about receiving a <a href="http://www.theenergydetective.com/what/overview.html">TED 1001</a> home energy meters for two weeks now. I downloaded and skimmed through the TED manual to see what the installation requirements were. I Googled online forums to learn how I might connect the TED display unit to my home Linux server and archive energy data. On Thursday, I received a new TED on loan that I could use for the energy efficiency experiment I had in mind. Even better - with the Victoria Day long weekend, I figured I had plenty of time to install the metering unit and test out communications over the power lines to the display unit.<br /><br />Then I opened my electrical panel and found this:<br /><br /><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/john.vangorp/TheJohnReport/photo?authkey=pA8q0rpOMB0#5201850395945159410"><img src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/john.vangorp/SDCvX-EJSvI/AAAAAAAACBg/WH2HCyqeAdQ/s400/IMG_5762.jpg" /></a><br /><br />The main service conductors come into the panel from the top left, just below the yellow sticker. These bad boys are thick and sturdy, and placed far too close together for me to get the CTs clamped on. Better yet, I can't de-energize these cables in order to feed them through the CTs - that would have to be done on the BC Hydro side of the circuit.<br /><br />So that's it - the monitoring experiment case is closed. BC Hydro does offer reasonable historical billing data, however, so I may still grab coincident weather data and run a quick model to check the efficiency of my home. The TED will be passed on to some lucky colleague at work to play with - I hope their electrical panel is easier to work with than mine!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-43893211669598801622008-05-09T06:15:00.002-07:002008-05-09T06:44:40.212-07:00email purgatoryAs mentioned in a <a href="http://jvangorp.blogspot.com/2008/01/my-social-outlook.html">previous post</a>, I'm a fan of desktop search engines like Google Desktop. With files at home and at work numbering in the tens of thousands, I can't imagine any other way of quickly finding what I'm looking for. I often still organize files into directories by project or category, but also often find that even if I remember exactly which folder I've placed a file in, it's <b>faster</b> to retrieve it via search rather than drill down five folders to get it.<div><br /></div><div>I used to have rich hierarchies of folders for storing work email messages, but now I rely primarily on just two - Keepers and Purgatory. The vast majority of messages I receive at work are either (a) messages I can scan and delete immediately, (b) messages I wish to keep for reference forever, or (c) messages I wish to keep for reference but which have a limited "shelf life". The realization that this third "Purgatory" category exists has helped me prune down my inbox tremendously. I found that I wanted to keep many messages with information that was useful over a span of weeks or months, but that after that period, the information was "stale" and no longer needed. I now drop such messages into the Purgatory folder, which has a simple Outlook archive rule - delete all messages older than 6 months. This sliding 6-month window lets me keep messages while they are useful and prunes out those that are not.</div><div><br /></div><div>A final note - a number of new tools are arriving to help people organize and find their email, one of which is <a href="http://www.xobni.com/">Xobni</a>, an extension for Outlook which uses social connections gleaned from your email to help you find messages and information about contacts. The Xobni Insight extension beta recently went public, but I had a chance to participate in the private beta a few months ago. My verdict? Although the organization by social context was cool and the email stats were spiffy, I still found my self gravitating towards Google Desktop to find messages. If I wanted to find a recent message from Joe, I found it faster to hit CTRL-CTRL to bring up the Google Desktop search box and type "from joe" rather than find the contact in the Xobni sidebar in Outlook.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-5210238923704561472008-05-04T06:36:00.002-07:002008-05-04T07:06:46.065-07:00franken-coderMy first computer (everyone has impossibly fond memories of their first computer, don't they?) was a Radio Shack Colour Computer. With 16k of RAM. For the kids out there, that's not a typo - I'm talkin' 16 kilo-<b>bytes</b> of space to drop code into. Friends helped me double that to 32k by piggy-back soldering additional DIP-style RAM chips on top (except the address/strobe pin - that we bent and connected to some address/strobe line on motherboard). Yup - those were the days...<div><br /></div><div>The reason I wanted a computer in the first place was so that I could <b>code</b> - I'd been fascinated with the concept of creating my own programs ever since buying a book on programming in Basic and reading it cover-to-cover the year before. I messed around with several little programs from that book (like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_wumpus">Hunt the Wumpus</a>) but the program I was most proud of creating was a Tron-style light cycles game for two players. I remember it taking forever to get several timing delays just right!</div><div><br /></div><div>I never really coded much after leaving high school. Sure, there were Fortran and Pascal and other courses that were part of the standard engineering program, but those courses were never fun in the way coding the Tron light cycles game was. Assigned projects were just that - assigned by someone else, to write a program that didn't "scratch an itch" that I had myself.</div><div><br /></div><div>The release of Google App Engine has sparked my interest in programming again, especially a style that I'll call <i>franken-coding</i>. I expect many see cloud platforms such as GAE as low-cost ways to host the comprehensive applications that they wish to write and deploy. I'm more interested in the new kinds of mini-applications that will be enabled by the zero-cost approach taken by GAE. Think Unix-style tools, but for the cloud - the equivalent of grep, cat, etc, but for web applications. While some folks may draw satisfaction writing everything from scratch, I'm quite happy to stitch together such mini-applications to accomplish a task.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm tempted to make my first GAE application a Tron light cycles game...</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-3940582307067945642008-04-12T14:27:00.006-07:002011-06-12T17:29:22.095-07:00embedded google app engineSometimes I get the craziest ideas whilst talking an hour-long walk by my lonesome. Here's one of them.<br />
<br />
The recent launch of <a href="http://code.google.com/appengine/">Google App Engine</a> has all a-twitter about the possibilities offered by cloud computing - especially when the starting cost is zero. I heard the news the day after GAE launched, which means I was half a day late in trying to get one of the 10,000 accounts open during the initial beta release. I did notice, however, that anyone could download the <a href="http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html">GAE SDK</a>, which, as one of the <a href="http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/gettingstarted/devenvironment.html">GAE help pages</a> says:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>...includes a web server application that simulates the App Engine environment, including a local version of the datastore, Google Accounts, and the ability to fetch URLs and send email directly from your computer using the App Engine APIs.</blockquote><br />
The SDK runs on any computer with Python 2.5 and comes packaged for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.<br />
<br />
These facts were tumbling in my mind during my walk when I switched to thinking about embedded device projects I'd like to work on sometime. I switched to <a href="http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato">Tomato</a> firmware on my Linksys WRT54G router some time ago, and I've been interested in turning a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2">Linksys NSLU2</a> (aka "the slug") into a Linux box for dedicated applications (web server, iTunes shared library, etc).<br />
<br />
Then the statement above from the GAE help page popped into my head: "The SDK runs on any computer with Python 2.5...". Wait, WHAT? A few quick Google searches later confirmed what I expected: several Linux distros for embedded devices have optional Python 2.5 packages. Another quick check shows that the GAE SDK is less than 3MB in size.<br />
<br />
Question: does this mean I can essentially run the GAE development environment on an embedded device? And if so, what the heck would you use that for? I'm not sure yet, but it would be fun to be one of the first to run GAE applications on my router...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-17138829868146347252008-03-31T21:18:00.002-07:002008-04-01T06:17:26.312-07:00the other 13%I wonder how many households in Canada have access to cable and/or satellite TV, and how many depend on over-the-air programming? Ten years ago such questions may have popped into my head and gone unanswered, but now the answer is 5 minutes away via Google.<div><br /></div><div>The title of this CRTC report, "<a href="http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/publications/reports/radio/cmri.htm">How Many Canadians Subscribe to Cable TV or Satellite TV</a>", is <b>exactly</b> what I was looking for. Both Nielsen Media and StatsCan numbers are remarkably similar - something like 87% of Canadians subscribe to cable or satellite TV. The other 13% get whatever scraps are broadcast over the air.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm now one of the other 13%.</div><div><br /></div><div>I had reduced my subscription to Basic cable some time ago because I found I wasn't watching any of the premium channels in the more expensive subscription packages. Today I cancelled Basic cable because I can't even remember the last time anyone in the family watched <b>anything</b> on any cable channel.</div><div><br /></div><div>I haven't dropped Shaw entirely, though - they still provide me with my precious Internet link. The only way I'll be giving that up is when someone pries it from my cold, dead fingers.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-10913498613762323142008-03-15T20:57:00.001-07:002008-03-15T15:54:17.965-07:00tasty google bookmarksI opened a del.icio.us account as soon as I read about it, and posted my first bookmark on November 4, 2004 - an overview of 10 alternatives to the recently-killed bittorrent search engine Suprnova, as it turns out. Since that time I've continued to post my bookmarks to del.icio.us, amassing a total of 900+ to date.<br /><br />I was posting a new bookmark recently when it suddenly struck me: I couldn't remember when I had last <span style="font-weight: bold;">used </span>del.icio.us to retrieve a bookmark. In fact, I view my friends' shared bookmarks on del.icio.us (via RSS) far more often than my own!<div><br /></div><div>I find that I've adopted a <i>search</i> frame of mind for information retrieval - and not just for new material. Having used Google Desktop for several years now, I tap CTRL-CTRL instinctively to search for and retrieve documents even when I know exactly where they are. And I've increasingly used the same approach for web sites that I've bookmarked - Google search is so fast that I can jump to a well-known site more quickly than I can type the URL! There are, however, some gems in the 900+ bookmarks I've collected in del.icio.us that I've forgotten about. Many times I've "rediscovered" sites when I attempt to bookmark an interesting web site I've found, only to discover that I had already bookmarked it in the past! But I find I can't break the Google search habit I've developed, even when a quick search of del.icio.us might turn up exactly what I'm looking for.</div><div><br /></div><div>Enter <a href="http://www.google.com/bookmarks/">Google Bookmarks</a>. I had given this new Google feature a try when it was first released, but found it didn't have several key features (like tagging) that made del.icio.us so valuable to me. Google Bookmarks has since added tagging, but otherwise had no additional "killer" feature to tempt me to switch. Until I read <a href="http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/03/google-bookmarks-faq.html">this snippet</a> on a blog, that is.</div><div><br /></div><div style="font-family: arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;font-size:100%;" ><blockquote>The most important features that set Google Bookmark apart from other services is that all your bookmarks are private (nobody else can see them) and fully searchable. You are no longer restricted to the title of the page, the description and the URL - you can search the entire page.</blockquote></span></div><div><br /></div><div>Whoa - hang on. GB indexes all the text on all pages I bookmark and makes it all searchable? After some testing, I also found that GB bookmarks are included (and highlighted) in Google searches (when I'm signed in) and in results-as-you-type in the Firefox search box. I was hooked.</div><div><br /></div><div>I've since switched to GB for all of my bookmarks, and now I see them pop up all the time when I'm searching for stuff using Google. Both the bookmarklet and Google Toolbar tools for bookmarking support tags and auto-suggest tags when you bookmark a page, but not at elegantly as del.icio.us does [sigh]. There's no doubt, though, that I get more out of my bookmarks now that they're woven into my "search reflex" approach to finding information.</div><div><br /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-66217969578646669752008-01-12T09:18:00.000-08:002008-01-12T09:38:32.656-08:00my social outlookEmail has oft times been called the "killer app" that drove exponential growth of the Internet, but I'm fascinated by how little my "email experience" has changed over the last 10+ years. My workflow for writing and reading email in Outlook 2003 at work is little different than the workflow I followed when I first started using email on bulletin boards in high school! The last major change in the way I handle email came when I switched over to Gmail for all non-work email two years ago - I now use tagging and search to manage email. In fact, <a href="http://desktop.google.com/features.html">Google Desktop</a> has done more to change my work email habits than anything in the Outlook client - I use just a few folders to hold all email and simply search to find what I'm looking for.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.xobni.com/">Xobni</a> Insight piqued my interest when I read about it in <a href="http://lifehacker.com/search/xobni/">this Lifehacker posting </a>earlier today. I've read postings in the past about attempts to apply a social network approach to organizing and presenting email, but this is the best realization of that concept I've seen to date. Xobni Insight is currently in limited beta for Outlook 2003/2007 - I've signed up and I'm anxiously awaiting an invitation to give it a try. I'll follow up with a posting about my experiences with Insight once I have it up and running.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-10073014515692738452007-09-27T19:17:00.000-07:002007-09-27T19:43:14.331-07:00my internet tv<div class="col-l"> <a href="http://www.getmiro.com/screenshots/win/shots/guide.jpg"> <img src="http://www.getmiro.com/screenshots/win/thumbnails/guide.jpg" alt="screenshot" /></a><br /></div><br />Several pieces to a puzzle I didn't know I was trying to solve have suddenly come together, and I'm only spending enough time to post this minimal update so that I can get back to finishing this project.<br /><br />The first piece is <a href="http://www.getmiro.com/">Miro </a>(formerly the Democracy TV project), a lovely media player that merges the play-anything smarts of <a href="http://www.videolan.org/vlc/">VLC </a>with the ability to slurp content from RSS feeds that use <enclosures> for content. When combined with a built-in BitTorrent engine, it's enough to send even the most seasoned TV studio executive to the liquor cabinet.<br /><br />As one might expect, there are several sources of RSS feeds for popular (and not so popular) TV shows. The excellent <a href="http://tvrss.net/">tvRSS </a>even allows you to tweak your feed so that, for example, it only contains HDTV-ripped shows. Now that's thoughtful! But a Miro "channel" created with such a feed is stark in comparison to several channels that come with the default Miro installation. Where was my show description, episode title and synopsis? Where were my video still thumbnails?<br /><br />I knew several web sites offered this kind of information, but I wanted a site that offered it in a structured format - preferable, as an RSS feed. It took a while to find, but <a href="http://www.thetvdb.com/">theTVdb </a>provides all of this, and more. This site is used by several home theatre PC projects to provide metadata for TV shows captured.<br /><br />But there was still one piece missing: how could I combine the TV torrent feed with the TV metadata feed to get one feed that Miro could use? I contemplated cracking open documentation pages for bash, PHP and Python to roll my own script when I remembered <a href="http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/">Yahoo Pipes</a>. This Yahoo project is designed to slurp in structured content like RSS feeds and provides tools for manipulating the data to create new feeds! Sounds just like what I'm looking for.<br /><br />Stay tuned for future postings about my antics with Yahoo Pipes...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-42424024548922637532007-09-18T20:16:00.000-07:002007-09-18T20:25:09.497-07:00the times is a-changin'A sign of things to come: the New York Times has decided to stop charging for the few remaining sections of its online publication that have been available by subscription only. The reason? I can't state it better than this senior VP:<br /><br /><p></p><blockquote><p>The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.</p><p>“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, <a href="http://nytimes.com/" target="_">NYTimes.com</a>.</p></blockquote><p><br /></p>In other words, they can make more money by attracting as many eyeballs as possible to their content (with ads) than they can by charging a subscription. Seems like advertising is being leveraged to support everything these days; I wonder what the limit is?<br /><br />NYT story <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/business/media/18times.html">link</a> (available for free, naturally).Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-60327851764324744272007-08-15T07:36:00.000-07:002007-08-15T07:39:53.311-07:00LOLcat meets DuneOk, it's now official: the whole <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat">LOLcat</a> meme is out of control.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_5eNtYG5DDVI/RflpNcdVMxI/AAAAAAAAAAc/WG24ClNJOhU/s1600-h/dunecat.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_5eNtYG5DDVI/RflpNcdVMxI/AAAAAAAAAAc/WG24ClNJOhU/s400/dunecat.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5042176937516413714" border="0" /></a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-48821165971967687082007-07-30T12:43:00.000-07:002007-07-30T12:45:20.052-07:00goto considered harmfulAnother great <a href="http://xkcd.com/">xkcd </a>cartoon...<br /><br /><img src="file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/johnvg/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot-4.jpg" alt="" /><br /><img src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/goto.png" title="Neal Stephenson thinks it's cute to name his labels 'dengo'" alt="goto" />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-70707771827842146932007-07-04T10:06:00.000-07:002007-07-30T12:46:05.722-07:00wikipedian protesterGreat new cartoon posted at <a href="http://xkcd.com/">xkcd</a>.<br /><br /><img src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/wikipedian_protester.png" title="SEMI-PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION" alt="Wikipedian Protester" />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-11694059265758628402007-07-01T07:47:00.001-07:002007-07-04T10:06:08.054-07:00checking out bytes<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7np2NbLpLrfOzscnxnAXNLyEiERkvZGhc63aO66bLHVcHv29-f6RLm-I78WVKOIe6cNK7CTn0WGHb3ds0mOfRuHbte5KqcKCq19Wq1D9mID-MC53rx1qCp2A7JHK2Xv9x_AM-Kg/s1600-h/audio-book-mp3-player.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7np2NbLpLrfOzscnxnAXNLyEiERkvZGhc63aO66bLHVcHv29-f6RLm-I78WVKOIe6cNK7CTn0WGHb3ds0mOfRuHbte5KqcKCq19Wq1D9mID-MC53rx1qCp2A7JHK2Xv9x_AM-Kg/s320/audio-book-mp3-player.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5082246095359771474" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /></span>It's always interesting to see old distribution models applied to new media, and especially humourous when those models enforce constraints that simply don't apply to bytes. So I had a chuckle when I learned about the <a href="http://www.overdrive.com/aboutus/">OverDrive</a> distribution system being used by the <a href="http://downloads.bclibrary.ca/">BC Libraries</a> to offer audio books to patrons.<br /><br />I was pleased to hear that our library system now offered audio books as a direct download (yay!) and disappointed (but not surprised) to learn that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Rights_Management">DRM</a> was involved (boo!). The chuckle came, however, when I read this snippet from the BC Libraries web site:<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 51, 255);">"You may have a maximum of 5 titles checked out from the Digital Library.</span><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 51, 255);">Downloaded titles are checked out for 14 days and are automatically returned to the library."</span><br /><br />"Checked out"? "Returned"? What, do the bytes magically travel back from my computer or MP3 player to their home servers [giggle]? Such restrictions make sense in a world where you are actually borrowing a book or physical media; as long as you have the atoms in your hand, no one else can use them. But downloaded bytes?<br /><br />I doubt, of course, that our library system lobbied for these restrictions - such concessions were likely by the publishers as a key condition to making them available through the library system at all. But when the gap between the fluid availability of bytes and centuries-old distribution model designed for physical objects becomes so glaringly obvious, it's only a matter of time before someone takes advantage of this inefficiency.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-31381064410072328712007-04-06T11:35:00.000-07:002007-04-06T11:46:15.794-07:00foxy del.icio.us<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh215LXOl9xQ-OunW5y5TTVjOqrq_zkipJhGZuqYNI9QApMbPVwESs59J9myX49nP9JWsp9QApYkuk4QJbE4rL1if71dGws8vxoTgbSHVOJbd5zRRpJ8WuP1KOlUJ_j8h6eMrTOuA/s1600-h/delicious-extension-screenshot.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh215LXOl9xQ-OunW5y5TTVjOqrq_zkipJhGZuqYNI9QApMbPVwESs59J9myX49nP9JWsp9QApYkuk4QJbE4rL1if71dGws8vxoTgbSHVOJbd5zRRpJ8WuP1KOlUJ_j8h6eMrTOuA/s320/delicious-extension-screenshot.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5050388059532384162" border="0" /></a><br />In a <a href="http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2007/04/making_firefox_.html">posting </a>on the del.icio.us blog yesterday, product manager Nick announces the availability of an updated del.icio.us extension for Firefox. The <a href="http://del.icio.us/help/firefox/bookmarks/quicktour">quick tour page</a> gives an excellent overview of the new features available, and being a del.icio.us fanboy, I had the new extension up and running in minutes. So far, I'm quite impressed with the greater integration of del.icio.us bookmarks within Firefox - my bookmarks now seem "nearer at hand" than they did when I had to jump to a separate web page to view and search them.<br /><br />If you "roll" with both Firefox and del.icio.us, check out the quick tour to see if you'd like to trick out your browser with this new extension.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-31579693761106888062007-03-18T07:21:00.000-07:002007-03-18T07:42:43.777-07:00pity the piratesWhen considering the negative impact of P2P networks, it's the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_of_America">MPAA </a>or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_Industry_Association_of_America">RIAA </a>that come to mind. But in the old days pirates used to steal digital bits and encode them onto physical discs for sale to consumers looking for movies, music and software on the cheap. What ever happened to them?<br /><br /><a href="http://torrentfreak.com/">TorrentFreak </a>brings a human face to the impact of P2P networks on piracy in the <a href="http://torrentfreak.com/p2p-file-sharing-ruins-physical-piracy-business/">tale of "Tony"</a>, a working-class bloke who lived his own rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags again story. Snippets like the following brought tears to my eyes:<br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 102, 255);">By 2001, Tony was renting a factory unit and employing 3 people to operate duplicators 24 hours a day, 7 days a week but although business was lively right up to 2004, profits were being squeezed every year. Forced to increase the amount of media burnt each week to make up for the shortfall in profit, it became clear that the business was in trouble - demand was falling dramatically.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 102, 255);">“In 2005 we shut down the factory unit” said Tony, “we just couldn’t keep going on that scale, nobody was buying anything in quantity anymore. So we closed up and moved back into a bedroom at home with my wife and her sister operating the burners, something they hadn’t done in years. They weren’t happy.”</span><br /><br />Forget the negative ads targeting illegal downloads of movies and songs. If more kids knew how their downloading activity have affected former pirates like "Tony" and his family, perhaps they'd give up downloading and get their pirated content at flea markets instead [sniff].<br /><p></p><blockquote></blockquote><p></p><p></p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-43845529311804199932006-12-13T20:36:00.000-08:002006-12-18T19:31:22.266-08:00jack's giftSanta, robots and the frightening year there was a Dark Christmas - what's not to like in a <a href="http://www.futurismic.com/2006/12/new_fiction_from_jason_stoddar_1.html">short story</a>?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-30765821951051292742006-12-04T16:14:00.000-08:002006-12-04T16:24:12.088-08:00law of accelerating returns<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitHm2xzLWl4NtNUWHe79ekez0E5jc87mkFCRjwAe2y83x6LAmRojPBlE1473mulZvUNsFo9rftCu6JvB-iy4YucJ16EaTj2bhtnW0gOCvL0LtiPiFsILWWFqnDMibLPlxLHtkk2w/s1600-h/growth-of-computing.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitHm2xzLWl4NtNUWHe79ekez0E5jc87mkFCRjwAe2y83x6LAmRojPBlE1473mulZvUNsFo9rftCu6JvB-iy4YucJ16EaTj2bhtnW0gOCvL0LtiPiFsILWWFqnDMibLPlxLHtkk2w/s320/growth-of-computing.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5004830845779653682" border="0" /></a><br />Some of the most mind-blowing stuff I've read in a while: click on Ray Kurzweil's <a href="http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0134.html">The Law of Accelerating Returns</a> and just read it.<br /><br />After reading this essay, I don't doubt Kurweil's assertion that we will likely be able to probe every nook and cranny of a human brain and model it in software within my lifetime. But would such a reconstituted brain be a person? I guess it comes down to this: is there <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_machine">a ghost in the machine</a>?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-38545362844257078912006-12-02T07:59:00.000-08:002006-12-02T08:03:47.683-08:00constituo, ergo sumWhilst reading <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/youtube.html">this Wired article</a> discussing why Google may have been willing to pay $1.65 smackeroos for YouTube, I came across what will definitely be the most high-brow groaner I'll see today:<br /><br /><em></em><blockquote>"If you aren't posting, you don't exist," says Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo, a new media consultancy. "People say, 'I post, therefore I am.'" <em>Constituo, ergo sum.</em> An interesting formulation that may well represent a new rationalism for the digital age. But for the moment, let's not put Descartes before the horse. </blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-63402862422149621522006-12-01T06:28:00.000-08:002006-12-01T06:31:44.412-08:00snow day<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://lh4.google.com/image/john.vangorp/RWoulqXEABE/AAAAAAAABAQ/TL2GSk7TCEg/SnowDayNovember2006.jpg?imgmax=160&crop=1"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://lh4.google.com/image/john.vangorp/RWoulqXEABE/AAAAAAAABAQ/TL2GSk7TCEg/SnowDayNovember2006.jpg?imgmax=160&crop=1" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Photo collection from our <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/john.vangorp/SnowDayNovember2006">snow day</a>...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-90974941756114404202006-11-16T17:42:00.000-08:002006-11-16T17:44:42.686-08:00wireless power<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/1139/2149/1600/wireless-power.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/1139/2149/320/wireless-power.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><div class="content"><p>An MIT professor presented an interesting paper at an American Institute of Physics forum this week: a description of a method to wirelessly transmit power to mobile devices. Unlike existing approaches that use inductive coupling (and normally require devices to be quite close together), this approach makes use of resonance and devices can be several metres apart.</p> <p>More details are available in this <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/wireless.html">MIT news release</a>, and the paper describing the theory involved is available <a href="http://eprintweb.org/S/article/physics/0611063">here</a>.</p> </div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17605747.post-60838847865045010422006-11-07T08:51:00.000-08:002006-11-07T08:52:08.419-08:00go deep<img src="http://docs.google.com/File?id=ad68nxh2cxsq_18dzkhnd" height="190" width="600" />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03922362120050659661noreply@blogger.com0