VNC

VNC: Virtual Network Computing. Awesome.

A few weeks ago I got set up with LogMeIn.com, a free site that, using VNC software allows you to remotely control any computer you own, as if you were sitting in front of it, from any other computer, anywhere. It is so useful. For instance, tonight I needed to post an hour and half of footage for client approval. I didn't want to stay at work all night and wait for it, so I came home, logged into my work Mac using LogMeIn and I've been controlling the process from here.

If someone were sitting in front of my work Mac while I was logged in they'd see the mouse cursor moving on its own, opening windows and running programs, all directed by some unseen hand. I had a particularly chilling experience of my own, being on that end of the equation. I was working a night shift about a month ago. It was probably 11:30 at night. I was, and had been for a while already, the only person in the office. Then, out of nowhere the suite next door to mine starts blaring music. Then it stopped. Then started again. It freaked me out! I got up and tentatively poked my head next door. No one there. I walked in and saw the mouse cursor happily zipping around the screen, user absent. I knew then what was going on, but it didn't lesson the shock I'd felt initially.

So VNC is good for getting work done even when you can't be there, and for scaring the snot out of the people that are.

The Act of Writing it Down

I love when I first crack open a new notebook. When it's a nice decorative one from Barnes and Noble even better, but really it doesn't matter what it looks like. Writing down thoughts, lists, ideas, whatever it may be keeps me focused. I go through notebooks so fast, which I know is wasteful. I would try to use every back and front page and try my hardest to write smaller, but it's hard for me. I write whatever way that comes naturally to me at the time. I'm about to run out of pages in my current notebook, so I will need to purchase a new one. They've been a real help when going through client photos these days.

I know most people have resorted to using computers or phones for keeping lists, but for me there's just something more helpful and concrete for me when I physically write it down. I would like to start keeping separate notebooks for all the things going on in my life such as one for daily reminders like groceries and then one for jotting down photo client details.

The more organized I am the better I feel, first I need a new notebook. Lately I've been finding cheap, cool ones in the bargain aisle at Barnes. I'll drop by there tomorrow.

Slick File Service

I've been looking for a good way to send large digital files to people, i.e. music to my sister, and I think I found a good, reliable, free service. Yousendit.com let's you email as many 100Mb or less files to as many people as you want, as often as you want. It's easy to use, seamless and quick. I'm a big fan, now.

I discovered it a few days ago when I got a Yousendit.com email from one of our vendors at work. He's a composer, and he uses Yousendit to email his large audio files to clients. It worked well, so I filed it away in case I needed it. Tonight was the perfect test opportunity. Kate took a bunch of pictures of the house for our real estate agent to use in advertisements, and the final file size for the bunch was 120 megs. Far too big to send via standard email unless I tediously sent each of the 35 photos in their own individual email. So I split the photos into two ZIP files, each smaller than the 100Mb limit and set them through Yousendit. Worked like a charm. The upload from my system to the Yousendit server was fast, and I already know from my experience with our composer that downloading is pretty quick.

Overall it's a good service for a freebie, and if you need to you can upgrade your account to a payed tier, which lets you email up to 2GB files! Nicely played, Yousendit.com.

Shortcuts

While GUI displays in applications make using them more user friendly, they aren't the most efficient ways to use your computer. Using keyboard shortcuts is much faster than say mousing to a menu, clicking to unfurl it, moving down to your given command and clicking it. Maybe not much faster on a per use basis, but over time the savings add up. Learning all the keyboard shortcuts you can for any given application will greatly speed up your use of the program and allow you to get a lot more done.

I use eight different applications on a daily basis at work, and a few more less frequently. Thankfully many shortcuts are shared across all of them, but each has many of its own unique shortcuts, which makes memorization difficult. But it's worth the time. Especially in applications where you tend to perform a lot of the same functions repeatedly, learning the shortcuts is a boon to your productivity. I'd be willing to say that if you just learned the shortcuts for the ten most common functions you use in each application you work with you'll realize huge dividends.

Now if only there were a keyboard shortcut to make this entry less boring.

Paying Bills Online

You want to catch up with an old friend. Do you take the time to post a letter? No, you email them. Do you drive to your local library to do research? Again, no. You jump on the internet. Do you step outside to determine the weather? Of course not. You log on to Weather.com. So why do you still balance a physical checkbook, and pay your bills through the US mail?

That question was directed at those of you who don't pay their bills online. For those of you that do, congratulations. Welcome to the future. You've joined an elite corps of individuals who understand that the digital frontier isn't something to be feared, but to be embraced and harnessed for the good of your free time. Why spend a half hour or more paying bills? That may have been good enough for the Dark Ages, but so was the plague, and one third of the population of Europe died as a result. I'd say the risk of plague is far more troublesome than the slim chance that some malfeasant might get a hold of your bank account information.

I've always had a tough time keeping tabs on bills. Even when I have the money to pay them I often lose track of them and end up late. So for me, the ease of online payment is a necessity. But it's beneficial for anyone. I have all my payees set up in Quicken. When I get a bill all I need to do is launch the program, pull up a virtual check, pick the right payee from the payee list, punch in the amount and hit send. Done. Bill's paid.

If I were a little more responsible it would always be that easy, but sometimes I have to sort out the previous month's bill, so it gets a little trickier. But at least I don't have to worry about writing a check, buying a stamp, and posting the bill.

This risks anymore are minimal. And if you pay bills electronically through your bank like I do, instead of through each individual payee, the risk is nearly nil. So there's really no downside, other than the fact that you need a computer and the smallest bit of online savvy. Even if you don't have a money management program like Quicken, you can participate. Most banks offer online bill payment through their website interface. All done through secure, encrypted transactions.

Minuscule risks. Big rewards. Zero rat-borne illnesses. Online bill payment is the bees knees.

Power Napping

I love napping, I know it's not the most productive thing to do, but I do love it. I go through a moment of hating myself after I take a nice nap, but really it was great and could do it all the time. Horrible I know. The computer was really acting up this morning, so I had to sit and stare at it for a while, I started falling asleep while doing that, so what did I do, I got up and passed out in my bed for an hour. Now, that I'm writing about it hopefully I won't do it again today. Stay awake Kate!

Thumbs Up to Thumb Drives...har har

I love these things.  Nothing makes moving large amounts of data around easier.  To think that only fourteen years ago I was saving files to 3 1/4 inch floppy discs with the waistband busting girth of...wait for it...  1.4 MEGABYTES!  And now I've got a USB thumb drive the size of my middle finger that holds more than 11,000 times that amount.  Sixteen gigabytes of data residing in around 1.5 square inches of space.

Boggles the mind.  My mind at least.  It's equally mind-boggling that there are people walking the planet whose minds are thoroughly unboggled by all of this.  Unboggled enough to work out how to build the magical memory stick sitting in front of me.  Trul the technology is straddling Merlin territory.  Thumb drives are solid state.  No moving parts.  They require no power source, getting all they need from the computer they interface with.  And yet they hold a static charge strong enough and stable enough to safely store up to tens of thousands of bytes of data without a single error.

And their capacity continues to grow.  The first thumb drive I owned, which I purchased four or five years ago held 256 megabytes.  Sizable compared to floppies, sure, but minuscule compared to my sixteen gig powerhouse, which really isn't that impressive considering there are already 64 gig drives available.  Let's say it took five years for these drives to mushroom from 256 megs to sixteen gigs.  That's an increase factor of 84.

Since my history is slightly suspect let's assume a growth rate factor of 50.  With that, using the the mid-range 32 gig drives as a jumping off point, we'll be enjoying drive capacities over one terabyte in less than five years.  That's over 1,000 gigabytes of data, not just in the palm of your hand, but in the crook of the palm of your hand.  If you hung eight to ten of those off your key chain you could carry the entire printed collection of the library of congress in your backpack (along with your Dungeon Masters Guide and your empty address book.)

I love this stuff.

The InterBrain

I think we, or at least I, take for granted sometimes just what a staggeringly powerful and unprecedented resource humanity has in the internet. In many ways it functions as a fully accessible, completely searchable (thank you Google) repository of human knowledge. The important stuff and the completely irrelevant.

It's a trivial little search I do pretty frequently that got me thinking about this. Often I hear a song on the radio, and either because the DJ doesn't announce them or I have to leave the car before he or she does, I can't find out the song and artist names. So now, as a matter of habit, I commit a short but unique cluster of lyrics to memory. Later I look up that phrase with the word "lyrics" tagged on to the end, and find the song and artist nearly every time.

It's easy to take that for granted, but imagine trying to get that simple bit of information even 20 years ago. You'd probably have had to call the radio station. If they answered and were willing, you'd have to hope someone there could identify the song based on the lyrics you remember. Barring that they'd have to be willing to go over the play logs for the day and tell you the songs that aired around the time you were listening. That might work once or twice, but the stations management would likely tire of constant calls. In fact, frequent calls of this nature from multiple people would likely cause them to institute restrictive policies. So then you'd have to remember to ask friends or a clerk at a record store until you got an answer or forget the song entirely. Not very efficient.

With the internet, the answer comes quickly and easily, with links to band information, gig schedules, YouTube videos for the song in question, and chances to instantly download it onto your iPod.

Trivial in a sense, but in the grand scheme, enormous.

Now imagine what it would have taken 20 years ago to get a solid explanation for say the role of enzymes in the breakdown of industrial pollutants. Or the schedules for most of the known comets. Or train schedules in Glasgow. If you could find answers at all, the process would be laborious and far from instantaneous. Plus you'd have to leave your house!

The internet is just staggering.

Move Over, Silicon

I just read something really cool, with huge implications for computing and electronics in general. Currently all computer chips and solid-state electronics are made from silicon. But silicon has limitations. At high operating frequencies, in the gigahertz range, silicon's natural electrical resistance generates a lot of heat. The faster chips become, the more heat has to be siphoned away from the components or you risk frying the chip. This tops silicon-based electronics out right where they are, in the gigahertz range, or billions of calculations per second.

But scientists are making impressive gains creating chips using another element, one much nearer and dearer (and the constituent element of) our hearts. Carbon. Carbon is 100 times less resistive to electricity, which means far less operating heat and the possibility of chips that can operate at terahertz frequencies, or trillions of operations per second. Chips that are a thousand times more powerful than the current state-of-the-art.

Here's the wild part. Carbon chips would be made from graphite, a form of carbon. More specifically, they're built from graphene, or a super-thin sheet of graphite only one atom thick. At one atom thick, graphene is essentially two-dimensional. Silicon's three-dimensional structure is monstrous by comparison. Graphene's nearly non-existent footprint will allow transistors only a few atoms wide, and chips infinitesimally smaller than today's lumbering silicon-based chips.

Imagine the computing power resident in today's super-computers, condensed into your cell phone. Or super-computers a thousand times more powerful than today's standard. With that much processing power, artificial intelligence would be right around the corner. Which is fitting and poetic I think. Our brains are carbon-based. How beautiful that the same element would make our digital progeny possible.

There are still some major hurdles to work through, but I'm optimistic.

Though "Carbon Valley" doesn't have quite the same ring.

Jason Geeks Out, Part 3

I've always had a thing for simulation games. Any game that takes a real world process, replicates it, and hands the controls over to you. And while there are some great simulation board games, like my favorite Republic of Rome, I'm mainly drawn to the computer variety. With sim games, it's all about the authenticity. The more closely you can model whatever system you're replicating, the more fun the game is, and with board games there's always a level of abstraction that pulls you out of the experience.

Wow, Jason. Your cold, technical analysis of sim games makes them sound like such a hoot, tell me more!

Oh, you have no idea. Actually, I don't either. Sometimes I wonder what's so enticing about this genre of games. They often, but not always, model relatively obscure experiences. SimTower was a favorite of mine years ago. It put you in charge of constructing a 100 floor skyscraper. As you built each new floor you had to decide how to distribute the space between office, retail, infrastructure and other categories. You had to design the elevator and escalator layouts to efficiently move people around the building, as well as take care of mundane details like trash collection. The goal was to finish all 100 floors, be profitable, and keep your tower dwellers happy. I don't think I ever got past the 35th floor.

Another game I played a decade or so ago was SimAnt. An ant colony simulation. No, not a digital version of the narrow, glass enclosed toy you might have had as a kid (though equally as pointless probably.) This was a faithful recreation of the day-to-day life of a colony as it attempts to spread itself across some hapless human's yard. Through resource management, queen movement, and ant specialization you slowly establish new hives. Once you've amassed a large enough colony and manage to infest hapless human's house, you win. I know. It sounds more like an episode of "Nature" than a game. But it was a lot of fun. I guess if sim games are your thing.

There are sims for almost everything you can think of. Some of my other favorites included Caesar II, a Roman city building sim, SimEarth, an planetary evolution sim, SimCity, the mother of all sim games, which takes city building and management as far as it can go, and of course, The Sims.

The Sims is the strangest of all the sim games, in my mind, for two reasons. One, because you play sim games to temporarily escape real life and The Sims simulates...real life! And two, because it was wildly popular, even among people that generally don't fall into the sim game contingent. If you haven't seen it, imagine this. A game that let's you create families, build them houses, buy them stuff, find them jobs and friends, and generally help them live their lives. They pay bills, have to call repairmen for plumbing leaks, and get fired if they consistently miss work. All the joys and troubles of life, manageably modeled in miniature.

It gets old after a while, but while the gloss is fresh, it is so addictive. The urge to play must be related to the urge that parents have, trying to make sure their kid's lives are better than their own. You get to live vicariously through any number of simulated people, letting them do all the things you can't, or won't. Or you can just set things up for them, and watch as at all falls apart.

The next logical step from The Sims is SimGamer. A sim game that models the life of a geeky sim gamer as he or she attempts to beat the latest sim experience, wasting hours of their lives in the process. Can't wait.

Moore's Law, in Reverse

Wikipedia does a good job of stating Moore's Law, a trend first discovered by Gordon Moore, co-found of Intel, back in 1965.

Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.

This leads to roughly a doubling of processing power and performance every two years. But here's the part I love. The costs for the resulting technology doesn't rise to scale. It either stays the same or goes down. So you end up with a reverse of Moore's Law on the cost of electronics, which basically states that, relative to the gains in speed, power, storage space, megapixel count, etc. we see every two years, the cost of this technology is effectively cut in half in the same period. For example, you might pay $1,000 for a 1Ghz computer, and the same $1,000 for a 2Ghz computer two years later, effectively paying only $500 for the same 1Ghz processing power.

Another great example is computer hard drives. For my first Mac back in 1998 I bought a 120Mb (note megabyte, not gigabyte) for roughly $160.00. That translates to about $1.30 per megabyte of storage space. Just a few minutes ago I bought a 1Tb hard drive to back up all of our music and photos, etc. One terabyte is roughly 1,000 gigabytes, or 1,000,000 megabtyes. And I payed less than I did for my old 120 megabyte hard drive. At only $109, the cost per megabyte of storage was only .0001 cents. In eleven years the cost per megabyte of storage space went from 130 cents to one 10,000th of a cent.

Really that's a far faster decline than what would be Moore's Law would prediction of 40 years, halving the cost every two years. That's because we're seeing not only a doubling of performance every two years and the relative decline of price that results, but also a steady real world decline in material prices which amplifies the cost to performance gap.

Given all this, imagine where we'll be in another decade. It's staggering to think about.

Holograms: Proof Lasers Can Do More Than Kill Aliens

Thanks again, Mela.  You've now given me ideas for two entries.  We still don't know each other that well and you're already an official sponsor of "A Year of Positives", with all the rights and privileges afforded that title (which consist of being mentioned in this sentence and the keywords at the bottom.)

Holograms are fascinating bits of artistry.  I'm no physicist, so I won't even attempt to explain how they work (mainly because I don't know.)  There are plenty of sites out there to confuse you thoroughly on the subject.  I'll just point out the obvious.  Holograms are 3D images captured on a 2D display medium using lasers and interference patterns.  Stare very carefully at the text in this entry.  Notice how it appears in full, unremarkable 2D?  That's because it isn't a hologram.

Now here's the part that will really bake your noodle.  If you take a true hologram (the image on your credit card won't work) and cut the image in half, you're left with two full copies of the entire image.  Cut both of those halves in half and you're left with four copies of the full image.  It doesn't matter how small you cut the pieces.  Regardless of the size or where the pieces are cut from they will always contain all the information from the original image.  Somehow the whole is contained in each piece.  How?  Black magic, clearly.

Now imagine this.  Any information can be captured holographically.  Instead of capturing a photo we could just as easily capture data.  Digital data,  like the information we currently save on computer hard drives.  Saving data holographically would revolutionize digital storage, completely precluding the need for back ups.  If a segment of your holodisk gets damaged, no big deal.  The remaining piece still contains all the information from the original.  Need to give someone a copy?  Just break off a chunk and hand it to them.  That tiny piece still somehow manages to contain everything the larger parent disk held.

It's mind-boggling, I know, but it's absolutely true.  Holograms are another example of just how astounding the physical universe is.

As an aside, I hope I never have to see that clown hologram close up.  CREEPY!