Wombat Diet

Clay Shirky is someone whose writing I’ve enjoyed but I hadn’t heard him speak until today when I came across this video of him speaking at Harvard about his new book, Here Comes Everybody (reviewed here). It’s worth a look. I’ll be back to see some of his other videos and I will look out for the UK edition of the book.

Sticking with Harvard for the day, this Open Challenge to Silicon Valley by Umair Haque about how the industry there is too busy partying to worry about things that will really make a difference struck a chord.

Two clicks away, BV Krishnamurthy opines

There is an urgent and crying need to improve agricultural productivity and ensure a fair price to the farmer through disintermediation. Our agricultural productivity is just about 50% of China’s. The architect of the country’s green revolution, Dr M S Swaminathan, has made several pragmatic recommendations. Since he is no longer in a position of authority, he has few listeners.

In the 90s I was a regular visitor to Silicon Valley and worked with colleagues and a small firm there to bring connectivity to agricultural researchers in international agricultural research institutes around the world. My global village moment happened when a rat, commiting suicide in a power relay station at Stanford, shut down the Internet for 400 organizations in Silicon Valley (Sun, Apple, Netscape, Cisco etc.) and international agricultural researchers from Lima to Manila. The scientists concerned were among the first Internet users in several countries. Nobody expects agricultural researchers in the 3rd world to be on the cutting edge of technology but, briefly, it happened.

Not long afterwards it became possible to execute a search across the gene banks of the world’s staple food crops thanks to changes in information systems inspired by new connectivity. The killer argument that helped raise the pittance needed for the project was this

If we do not act then children in the developed world will have better access to information than our scientists.

And every time I went to Silicon Valley I wondered what it would take to open the eyes and hearts of those who could make a stupendous difference half a world away if only they cared or knew.

Somehow there’s a glimmer of hope in Clay Shirky’s talk, and the title. If there are possibilities for freedom there must be for social justice and compassion, but I still don’t know how to get a flash mob of philanthropists on the job. Meanwhile funding for agricultural research goes down, food prices go up, and in Silicon Valley the party goes on.

Tags: BV Krishnamurthy, Clay Shirky, Harvard, Umair Haque

Today I rediscovered Microsoft OneNote. I had tried it before, back when I was looking for something to help me implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) approach to staying organized. OneNote was a nice application but for what I wanted I preferred MyLifeOrganized.

Since then I’ve used a variety of wiki applications to manage information, mainly

• TiddlyWiki
• PMwiki
• Deki Wiki

which represent baby, mummy and daddy bear solutions respectively, all open source. There any number of wikis out there, as a glance at wikimatrix can confirm. If that site makes your eyes glaze over, you are not alone. Before you ask… do you have just one kind of footwear?

TiddlyWiki is nice web site in a single file solution that you can keep on a USB memory stick. I used to use it with the Firefox extension TiddlySnip, which made clipping notes from web pages and tagging them quite easy. It’s what I used to create TiddlyFolio, a wiki for recording securely the contents of your wallet (credit cards etc.). TiddlyWiki can be used to set up reference material clipped from Wikipedia (here’s an example). TiddlySpot offers free web hosting for TiddlyWikis.

PMwiki is nice PHP based wiki that stores content in files. It’s fast, easy to use, suitable for use by several people if running on a server (it needs a web server) and, like TiddlyWiki (using a freely downloadable theme), can be made to resemble Wikipedia (using the Monobook skin). PMwiki keeps a log of changes, which can be handy even if nobody else is using the wiki.

Deki Wiki is a sophisticated wiki that uses a MySQL database in addition to a web server. It is something I’m trying out at the moment on an Ubuntu server. Unlike the others, it has WYSIWYG editing which makes it appear quite attractive to use, and it has good page level security . However, I find editing with it a bit of a struggle and it’s a little slow to use.

For me, as yet, there is no perfect wiki. Among other things, I would like to be able to clip web pages with a right-click, and to explore the wiki content using a tag cloud.

In the meantime, the best tool I have for snipping data from the web is OneNote. It’s outstanding, so good I felt a small twinge of regret that it was a Microsoft product not an open source one. (You can try it for free for a couple of months).

Tags: wiki

Ubuntu v8.04 was released today. I wasn’t going to join all the chatter* about it, a lot of which was undoubtedly written in advance, but I had a problem with it that I know someone else will have so I’m posting solution for all affected to find with Google.

I had the Hardy Heron, as this release has been named, running on an old laptop and my Ubuntu desktop PC not long after the downloads completed — clean installs in both cases.

Yes, I experimented with both a torrent and regular download and felt a little guilty about consuming two lots of bandwidth in the first hour. The torrent (using Opera’s built-in torrent support) took forever to get going but then the hare left the tortoise for dead. I expiated any guilt by leaving Opera sharing the download for a few hours.

Everything went well with both installations apart from my Ubuntu desktop PC’s screen resolution being downgraded from 1280×1024 to 1280×800 (on a Samsung Syncmaster 181T). The result looked terrible.

I’ve edited xorg.conf files before but my feeling about delving into that kind of thing is simply: Linux is just not going to make it if this is necessary. This was not supposed to be necessary any more<sigh>.

Naturally, I was a little disappointed.

I considered reverting to the last version and doing an upgrade with apt-get instead of a clean install. However, on a hunch I connected the computer directly to the monitor, bypassing my ATEN CS1734B KVM switch (which I recently reviewed) and tried again to set the resolution with “Detect Displays”. Bingo! 1280×1024.

Strangely, there was no problem detecting the correct maximum resolution with the previous version of Ubuntu with the ATEN switch in place.

*herons are known as chatterin’ birds where I come from, and anyone who has stood under a nest of hungry herons knows why.

Tags: ATEN CS1734B, ubuntu

Today I discovered a delightful little gadget that does a small job beautifully. It’s WebGuide, shown at the bottom in the image to the right.

What it does: among other things, it lists pending recordings for Vista Media Center; no need to fire up Media Center. In any case, I never found a way to do it as I wanted using Media Center, so this is a neat solution.

The only other gadget I’ve added to Vista is one for playing BBC radio, usually either Radio 4 or BBC World Service.

For all my criticism of Vista, Microsoft’s Media Center works very well as a personal digital recorder. Well enough, that it may be the best reason to own Vista. It’s far from perfect, but with a nice TV and good content now and then it’s a treat being able to watch what you want when you want. –In my case, I’m hoarding a few things until I’m no longer a student.

Media Center would be much enhanced if one could browse a decent TV schedule online, i.e., one with reviews, and select programs by clicking on them. This is not possible because the TV schedule in the UK is subject to monopoly control and must be licensed. The electronic program guide is little use as anything other than a schedule.

There’s a petition about this on the Prime Minister’s web site, I happened to discover a while ago, with a pitiful 400 signatures. Presumably the newspapers are not be in favour?

This gadget makes one of Vista’s little habits clear: when asked to record a series it records repeats you didn’t even know were on, even months later, and this uses up disk space and means you have to filter out the duplicates later.

The last program scheduled in the listing above is a repeat of something I recorded months ago, a 5 minute program on Iraq.

In fact, I didn’t know I had this problem until I recently discovered another useful utility: De-Dupe DVRMS. It scans your recordings and suggests which may be duplicates. The file names typically contain the program name, the channel and the time and date. If recordings are bracketed — with 5 minutes added at the start and end — then the content is different too, and would be even if it were broadcast in digital form. This utility relies on program guide metadata in the file. It’s not foolproof, but it’s helpful for zeroing in on what to check.

I am not watching any more television but I am accumulating enough for long flights and rainy, “nothing on” days in future. Sometime, when I have time, I might figure out how to transcode for and sync with my video iPod, but I suspect I’ll get a little notebook PC first and I’ll prepare for travel by stashing a few recordings on memory sticks.

The only other desktop gadget I use is one from Infrant, now Netgear, showing the status of my network storage. All of these are on my 2nd monitor.

If something goes wrong I’ll know right away. The fan turns slowly in a lanquid and satisfying way. The real thing is working a bit harder.

Actually, I use one other application that’s not part of either Vista or Yahoo’s suites: Symmetricom’s SymmTime 2008. It’s a roll-your-own multi-clock display. Handy if you call people in different time zones and you like to have accurate time (from NTP servers).

I suppose our houses will be full of little virtual gadgets in a few years. So far the only one I’ve seen for sale is a rabbit whose ears can indicate if you have email, or, perhaps if your options are underwater and it’s time to jump from the nearest window ledge.

How long before Media Center understands spoken instructions? It’s overdue and doable surely. Now that would be “all singing, and all dancing.”

Tags: gadgets, vista

Vista Service Pack 1 finally showed up in my Windows Update.

I have had some fun with Vista lately. My C: drive was approaching capacity and Vista told me that I couldn’t extend it. I succeeded in the end but it was unreasonably difficult. Vista makes simple things needlessly complicated, like keeping your software and data separate, e.g., (read how to change the user profile location in Vista).

Foolishly, arguably, I am running an “OEM” version of Vista on my main Vista PC; i.e., an original equipment manufacturer’s version–I am the manufacturer. This was cheaper than a regular copy but the downside is that it’s tied to a particular PC. I cannot install it anywhere else. From a disaster recovery point of view this is not good. (I bought my regular copies in the US for a fraction of the ripoff UK prices).

Yesterday, when it seemed I may have a failing hard drive, on top of a corrupt version of Vista, on top of a too full C: drive, I went out and bought a spare hard drive, just in case. I couldn’t get a Seagate 500Mb drive and so came home with a Samsung 750Gb drive. Would Vista accept this? Luckily, in the end, I didn’t have to reinstall, so I didn’t get to find out.

I was fully backed up but my Acronis TrueImage recovery CD declined to boot — or, rather, it crashed on startup — potentially complicating a recovery if I’d needed to do a bare metal restore.

The cumulative effect of being told, or of fearing, what I could and couldn’t do was wearying. Being able to say

Excuse me, this is my computer, just DO IT

is one of the joys of Linux. Not being treated like a thief is another. Not needing serial numbers and keys and subscriptions is another. Dispensing with anti-virus and similar software is another… for now.

Now that the Asus EEE PC has been updated, and with Intel’s Atom processor on the way, Microsoft should be worried.

Unfortunately, I still have quite a long list of applications that are not yet available for Linux, but some of the better ones are in progress.

I’m hoping to buy a new laptop this summer, with

• Ubuntu pre-installed
• 8+Gb RAM, no hard drive (instant power on)
• built-in wireless networking (preferably 802.11n draft 2.0, if it isn’t too power hungry, or even WiMAX)
• an Atom processor, with a decent battery life
• a price tag of $550 or less

This is where the market is going, and it’s why Microsoft has recently extended the life of Windows XP. Vista just won’t run on machines like this.

Microsoftie Eric Lignam recently blasted people for installing Vista upgrades without ever owning a qualifying product. Legally his case may be inarguable but a more important point is being overlooked and, given the growing number of ways that Microsoft is trimming its prices, who can tell where the official discounting really ends?

(I paid £100 for Microsoft Office 2007 last year and was recently offered it by Microsoft for £38.)

The point is that soon Mr.Lignam may have to pay “customers” to use Microsoft software.

In the airport on my way to Sicily the other day I was offered a chance to buy a ticket to win a brand new Bentley car. I declined, saying that, alas, I wouldn’t even take the car if it was offered to me for free — much to the surprise of the man selling the tickets. It’s just not a headache I have any need of. A cheap and cheerful electric or hybrid car would be another matter, however.

Tags: Asus EEE PC, ubuntu, vista