Sub Ubi

I caught this linked off of Scripting News:

Bye Tin Machine. Bye dPod. Bye Sprocket. I’m going to miss you guys. And I’m especially going to miss all my year’s of data; pix of Aimee and good friends and my first Burning Man. Videos of artformula hooping in the barn with such grace. My various outlines, containing my thoughts, dreams, ideas. My old emails, that I was saving forever, in order to remember the love I felt at one time for another human, and the ensuing email exchanges that lifted my heart. Goodbye to all the calendar entries that I dutifully entered into DayLite, content in knowing that I could look back at my past using this filter to see how far I’d come. Goodbye to my lovely red backpack which always seemed to fit just the right amount of stuff and hang so well on my back. Some of this was backed up, most not. You know how it goes. Well, hopefully not.

These kinds of stories always scare me. I’ve considered building an online service using technology like that from Coraid to establish a storage farm, but I think Amazon already did.

Which leaves me with some simple questions for Amazon’s S3 team:

If I encourage my parents to back up all of their pictures to your service, how long will you be around? How robust is S3 as a backup? Is it truly geographically redundant storage? Can I *trust* it?

It seems like the best option available to me to date. Other than that, I need to purchase a quality tape drive and become a backup-admin for myself and my parents.

Here’s a corporate act of desperation: get big, A-list webloggers to pimp your product under the banner of “getting user feedback”.

Both BoingBoing and MAKE Blog (perhaps among others) were asked by Sony for feedback on their… not yet shipping?… eBook reader.

Perhaps this is because Sony was beaten to market by a higher-resolution (1024×768 vs. 800×600), less restrictive (TXT, HTML, PDF without DRM), more fully-featured eBook reader.

If Phillips was sharp, they’d have readers in the mail to both the BoingBoing and MAKE crews right now. If they can be bought with a request for feedback, Phillips can certainly score a free review by sending them product. Today.

This video at YouTube is a really sweet juggling segment by Chris Bliss, recorded at Pickwick and Frolick in Cleveland.

Sweetness.

We just arrived at Sunset Beach, NC. A week of relaxation, family, friends, fun, and not much work, really.

I’m going to do a jog on the beach, swim for a bit, and then start chillaxing with a vengeance.

I’m not a full-on GTD nut; in fact, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with years with to-do lists, organizers, PDAs, and the like. I love the organization they bring to my life; I hate the fact that I can see I’m so busy.

If that makes sense to you, read on.

These past few months, I’ve had quite a bit on my mind: finishing and defending a doctoral thesis, transitioning to a postdoctoral post (little devices, languages, and operating systems related), and all the while generally jetting around the world (Houston (USA), Denmark, Scotland, Los Angeles (USA), Cleveland (USA), and Portugal). Really, when I signed up, they didn’t tell me about the travel. Honest.

So what do I do? I’m not such a fan of calendars; they’re heavyweight. As a Mac user, and fan of outliners, I like Kinkless GTD + OmniOutliner Pro. However, at some level, this is heavy. Nice, but heavy; it requires several applications (OmniOutliner, iCal) plus some big Applescripts.

Recently, I found ToDo.txt. This looks promising for the old-school GTD nut in you. It’s a couple of shell scripts that maintain a text file, using things like sed, awk, and grep to update and present your GTD lists. Now, this looks promising, but I’m torn in two directions. In one, it’s simplicity itself. In the other, I abhor shell scripts; they’re the ugliest sin ever inflicted on programmers after C, and plain text is about as far from a robust back-end as you can get. (Accessible via vi? Yes. Any consistency guarantees? No.)

As you can see, tools are toys—they are what we look at when we don’t really want to Get Things Done. At the same time, I’ve found that using Kinkless + OOP has been very useful. It just… isn’t quite what I want yet. It seems like a GTD system should be very easy to use (quick), omnipresent, and portable—I should never have to be without my to-do list.

Part of me thinks that I just need to use an old-fashioned Hipster PDA, and be done with it. Another part of me says that my soon-to-arrive Irex Iliad may become a useful tool for carrying around plain-text GTD lists—it is, after all, should be a very portable, low-power eInk device well suited to this kind of thing. Something that combines the ease-of-use of ToDo.txt with the ability to render and synchronize those lists to my Iliad… it’s possible, anyway.

If I stumble onto something amazing, I’ll let you know.

I have a small hardware budget. So, I spent some of it.

LEGO Mindstorms NXT

First, a LEGO Mindstorms NXT has arrived. This small platform provides sensor inputs, actuators, and a Bluetooth radio in a lickable plastic shell. It’s excellent for experimenting with, and will become a new flagship environment for the Transterpreter. Yes, it is a toy. But it is an incredibly useful toy in terms of the research that I’m interested in (doing lots of things, safely, apparently at the same time, on small devices). Having robust, well supported hardware to work with is an important part of that work.

Irex Iliad

Second, I ordered an Irex Iliad. This is a light (400g) eInk device, sized to an A5 piece of paper, with 1024×768 resolution. I stole a picture or two from here to give you a sense for what it looks like:

The second picture is to demonstrate that the device can be drawn on. My understanding is that the Iliad will support the annotation of documents with a touch-sensitive stylus. My assumption is that I’ll eventually be able to read PDFs on the reader, annotate them with the stylus, and export the documents again with those annotations intact. This way, I can carry my entire library of research articles (in PDF format) on a compact flash card, and have them always available, along with any notes I choose to make.

Either way, I’m very excited about the reader. So many of the reasons I carry a laptop can be subsumed by an ebook reader capable of handling plain text, HTML, and PDF. “To do” lists, calendars (printed to PDF), RSS feeds (rendered to XHTML or PDF), and more can all be carried around for easy reference, as well as a huge library of work/research related reading material. Taking things further, I can imagine that my teaching workflow can be greatly improved if I’m able to collect electronic documents from students (code, essays), comment on them electronically using the Iliad, and then ship back the annotated document. Portable, easy, and environmentally friendly!

Who knows… maybe the Transterpreter will run on the Iliad as well…

I’m in the USA until the 23rd of August. I’ll have a week or two of genuine vacation where I won’t care about work-type things. However, email is a good way to reach me regardless.

If you want to call, you can take one of two approaches. My SkypeIn number will forward to a phone near me, so you could call the 440 number on my “Bio” page (link, right). Or, you can use Skype (username: jadudm), and call me, even though I won’t be logged in. Skype will forward the call to my SkypeIn number, which is kinda cool.

If I get some downtime, I’ll likely move this weblog from MT to Wordpress, and aggregate a number of weblogs I contribute to here. This will become the aggregation point for my own blogging, and the occasional, personal post will filter in as well. Looking back at previous things I’ve written here, it won’t change the content significantly. It does, however, explain why I write so little here—all sorts of stuff is going other places, that’s all.

It should be noted that I finished Katamari. A very fun game: simple, yet novel.

Yes, all I did this weekend was eat and play video games. In particular, one video game. It was a serious change of pace.

I’ll be back-and-forth to Manchester on Tuesday, flying to Ohio on Wednesday, and driving to New Jersey on Friday. Connectivity will be sparse, so my apologies if I’m mostly unreachable. When possible, I’ll forward my SkypeIn number somewhere sensible.

Squeaky asked:

So, when would “Why, yes, I’m a doctor” actually come up?

Scene: A 747, halfway through its journey from the UK to the USA. An airplane person approaches my seat, quietly.

[Airplane Person] Excuse me, sir. I don’t want to cause a fuss, but we noted that you are Doctor?

[Me] (With a quiet, reserved bravado) Why, yes I am.

[Airplane Person] Oh, that’s wonderful. Could you come with me for a moment?

Using nothing more than a sponge, the frayed ends of a sweater, and a blank CD-R, I proceed to deliver 12 babies, reattach a man’s arm, and update the antivirus software on the pilot’s laptop to the most recent version without a live network connection.

That’s why it would come up. DUH.

Friday, July 14th, 2006, I defended my thesis “Exploring Novice Compilation Behaviour in BlueJ”. Pending the submission of minor corrections, I will have completed the requirements for a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science.

In other words, I passed, and can now say “Why, yes, I’m a doctor” when people ask the right question.

Today, I played Katamari Damacy.