Archive for June, 2009

Oh Be Careful Little Mind What You Think

You better start working now on controlling the urge to think about running that annoying coworker over or running into that guy that just cut you off in traffic. Toyota, today, showed off its new thought-controlled wheelchair. The user wears a cap that monitors for certain brain waves every 125 milliseconds which is pretty much instantaneous to a human. The person basically just thinks about moving an arm or a leg to instruct the wheelchair to move.

Toyota hasn’t said when this product will hit the consumer market, but it will certainly be one to watch as that seems to be the new forefront of computer and device interfaces.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jun 30th, 2009

Human Body OS 2.0: 15 Must-Have Features

Well, God did a pretty good job with the Human OS 1.0. It’s done quite well for us for some time, but let’s face it, it’s time for an upgrade. While it hasn’t made it public exactly when Human 2.0 will debut, but the newest firmware should account for much-needed changes in the now out-of-date Human 1.0 firmware with some new features that we have learned from experience from the computing industry.

better logging (see syslog)
Pain is about as worthless as an error message on your computer screen reading just: “error”. Sometimes it takes a doctor just to figure out what in the world is wrong with your body. Having some better logging would just be much easier and more efficient.

kill
I’m not talking about killing other humans. When I go to sleep at night and can’t stop thinking about some event the next day or one that happened that day, I just want to make it stop. Being able to manually kill off a process would make things much easier.

search (see Spotlight)
While it’s not the best practice, good search can overcome the worst of organization skills. When I’m having problems remembering something, why can’t I just search for it?

a good antivirus
Like a good ol’ Windows 98 machine hooked directly to the public Internet, our bodies are susceptible to all kinds of viruses. A good antivirus would help increase uptime due to stupid things like viruses.

delete
Sometimes you see or hear things you just didn’t need nor want to hear. Having the ability to remove those unwanted memories would be awesome.

better multi-threading for males
Guys don’t multitask. If they say they do they’re lying. I know because I am one. With all the devices and thing competing for our attention, we as males need better multitasking.

improved process scheduling for females
I wouldn’t know, but I’ve heard and learned that females spend most of their time multitasking. I know sometimes I wish that my wife was able to just turn off thoughts about certain problems to not think about them for a while.

file sharing
Have you ever had to share memories or strategy with people in those archaic, analog fashions like speaking, writing, or typing? That’s just ridiculous. We need to be able to just open up a file share to let others grab that data for their use.

video chat / screen sharing
Let’s face it, sometimes there’s just no substitute for being there. Being able to share experiences with others as we see them is sometimes necessary for them to understand how we feel. Otherwise we have to resort to those old-school, ridiculous processes I mentioned above.

a good firewall
Sometimes people are just annoying. Sure, you can do your best to ignore them, but it takes resources for our brains to process who they are and what they’re saying before deciding to ignore them. Having a firewall in place could help eliminate the need for those unnecessary time wasters.

live migration (see vMotion)
Ever been working on a project at work and had to leave, only to realize that the person coming in needed to get brought up to speed? Imagine if you could just vMotion that project to the co-worker who was coming in to fill your spot. Your project wouldn’t be slowed down a bit, nor would you miss that important lunch date.

process delegation (see Xgrid)
This is possible in the human 1.0 firmware, but through a much more manual process. Once again we have to use these antiquated processes like talking and typing to delegate tasks. Automatically handing out tasks would speed things up for sure.

better battery life
Eight hours of down time every day?! That will never hold up, even with the most lax of SLAs. Good uptime will be key for human 2.0 to be a success.

people management (see Group Policy)
It would be far more efficient if we could just set policies to not allow humans to break laws than to pay police to be sure humans are caught if they break laws. This would also be helpful for parents, teachers and cult leaders.

copy-paste
Why should we constantly be trying to read things and memorize them? Let’s just copy-paste them into text files to search and share with others.

What about you? Are there any features that we need in Human OS 2.0 that you use every day on your computer?

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Jun 29th, 2009

Constant Disk Activity from MythTV

Last night I was playing with my MythTV box setting up a frontend on my MacBook and I noticed after I was done playing that the MythTV backend server’s disk was constantly making noise. When I stopped the MythTV backend services, the noise stopped. Then once I started it back up the activity continue the way it was before. After doing a little Googling, I found out that others had had this problem on Ubuntu 8.04 shortly after installing MythTV. Later in the bug report someone discovered that on their machine, the constant disk activity was MythTV logging that it couldn’t connect to the MySQL server. Turns out they were exactly right. In my /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log file, it was constantly writing:
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
2009-06-26 23:50:02.359 DB Error (KickDatabase):
Query was:
SELECT NULL;
No error type from QSqlError? Strange...
QSqlQuery::prepare: database not open
QSqlQuery::exec: database not open
2009-06-26 23:50:02.412 DB Error (SimpleDBStorage::load()):
Query was:
SELECT station FROM record WHERE recordid = :WHERERECORDID
No error type from QSqlError? Strange...
2009-06-26 23:50:02.413 Unable to connect to database!
2009-06-26 23:50:02.414 Driver error was [1/1045]:
QMYSQL3: Unable to connect
Database error was:
Access denied for user 'mythtv'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

Turns out, I had been messing with the MySQL permissions to get my MythTV frontend machine to work and hadn’t noticed that I broke the backend. If you install MythTV and notice that you get constant disk access after it starts, this is likely the culprit.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Jun 27th, 2009

Evernote Gets Sharing

Everyone’s favorite note-taking and syncing application has finally gotten their first implementation of sharing out the door. I’d have to say, that was my biggest issue with Evernote. Otherwise, the app is awesome. It’s a great way to get things off the brain and into the computer so you can come back to them later and not worry about them now. For people with a memory like mine, that’s a wonderful thing. Now, you can share those notes with others selectively as public notebooks have been available for some time.

This is being called “Phase 1″ of sharing by Evernote and the sharing does have a few restrictions in its current implementation. First, the shared notebooks are not available in the desktop client. One does have to log into the web client to see any shared notebooks or manage their shares. Second, sharing is only available to paid subscribers. The subscription price is a measly $5 per month. Not bad for a service that lets you take notes, clip web pages, and pictures and make them available to your Mac, Windows PC, iPhone, Blackberry and a few others via the web interface. It even parses the images for text to make your pictures of docs searchable. I would expect a lot of the killer features of Evernote to become pay-only features, since, well they’ve gotta eat too.

What’s to come with Evernote? They’ve let us know that sharing from the desktop and mobile clients is on its way. Other than that, they’ve left it up to the user community for some new features :)

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jun 26th, 2009

Google Voice and the Future of Telephony

When Google announced Google Voice, I looked at it, thought it was intriguing, and kept on my merry way. Now that it’s here and available by invite, I started looking at it and am realizing that it’s much bigger than I originally had thought. It’s not just another VoIP service, it’s a paradigm shift for telephones. It’s doing to phone routing what we have done with email. Your individual phones really just become clients that connect to a central call routing system of some sort.

The idea goes something like this: You have one number to give out to others. That number can ring at your desk at work, your home, and on your mobile phone. Depending upon who’s calling, you could even have it ring your spouse’s phone as well. That’s not a huge paradigm shift from what standard VoIP systems are today, but it allows you to have greater flexibility in using phones from outside your VoIP systems and multiple ones at the same time, meanwhile, adding some pretty sweet features to boot.

In the future, I can see this becoming the standard way of having a phone and simply buying a device to hook into the Internet from what is now your cell phone or home phone provider. Much the way Thunderbird or Outlook or your Blackberry hook into your mail server and pull down all the same mail, your phones simply listen for calls from one centralized place. This idea only makes sense since we really don’t want to have to keep track of multiple numbers and try multiple places to reach someone. We just want to reach them. We do the same with our searches, our documents, and with our emails. Why not with our phone calls?

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jun 25th, 2009

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