Mile High Pixel

I’ve been hearing a lot about Twitter lately, and while I do use it I don’t always enjoy it (which speaks to a certain level of sadism, but that’s another story altogether).  I do, however, appreciate how aptly named the service is, because when used in a manner which some people seem to call “effectively” it really does end up like a flock of birds all trying to be heard over each other at once, and your real friends get lost in the chatter.

It used to be that people belonged to groups with distinct interests, had a distinct socio-econimic status, and maintained their presence within a distince geographical location.  That geographical distinction was shattered with the advent of the internet, allowing people to broaden their social circles regardless of their place on this earth. The next one to go was the socio-economic distinctions as the cost and accessibility of the internet was scaled down to poorer and more rural areas.

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Let’s face facts:  everyone, at some point in time, has entertained the thought of writing a book.  We all like to think that there’s some little priceless nugget of information tucked away in our brain just waiting to be shared with the world and we’re obviously doing a disservice to humanity by keeping it locked away.  The truth is that 9 times out of 10 there are better ways to share your information with the world. If you have an idea try starting a blog, or if you have some specialized knowledge try offering to teach some courses at your local university.

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I recently came across a problem developing an application that I hadn’t thought of before (mostly because it’s not something I’ve ever had to do before) but is, in its generic sense, a problem as old as computers themselves. That problem is, of course, portability.

No I’m not talking about the dreaded Windows/Unix/Apple debate. I’m talking about something as simple as database technology. I was surprised to find out that PHP didn’t natively support database driver interchangability! Even Java supports it (to an extent), yet I was 3 weeks into my project before I realized that my testing server was running MySQL, but the production server was going to be running PostgreSQL.

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I saw my first Google Street View car cruising around Regina today, and the first thought that went through my head was that of looking forward to seeing all the confused looks of my fellow citizens as the car drives by with a giant high definition 360 camera strapped to the top. I entertained this thought all afternoon until I got home and did a little research, only to find out that Google Canada decided to blur all the faces in the images.
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Canadian researchers at the University of Waterloo have discovered a way to harness the power of sulphur, which has over 3 times the energy density of traditional materials, in rechargable batteries. The process involves melting the sulphur and pouring it on to porus carbon which drew in the melted liquid sulphur and created sulphur nanofibers within the carbon, increasing the surface area contact between the two elements and allowing the sulphur to remain chemically stable while recharging under high current.

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Here’s a bit of nifty tech for you, a computer within a computer to save you money.  Microsoft Research and the University of California revealed what they call Solimniquy in their NSDI 2009 paper a couple of weeks ago, and while there’s not much new going on in terms of technology, it’s the implementation that’s got people saying “I want one.”

Solimniquy (which means the act or habit of talking in one’s sleep) is a small integrated device which would be a part of the network stack on a standard PC. While a computer is awake, Solimniquy quietly passes on all traffic between the application layer and the network interface card (NIC) and everything is as it should be, however the real innovation comes when your computer goes in to sleep mode.
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Imagine yourself reading a book.  Imagine the feel of the paper in your hands, the ease with which you turn the page, the thrill of wondering what comes next.

Now imagine yourself reading a newspaper.  Imagine the paper as it resists your every attempt to keep it straight, the woman next to you on the bus glaring at you as you elbow her once again trying to read that last comic or check the sports scores.

Newspapers as we know them are going the way of the dodo bird, and the newspaper industry is doing all it can to try and make sure we know that.  And while they slowly waste away in to nothing, where are people really getting their news?

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In honor of the weekend I figured I’d take the liberty of trying out a few new blogging tools which may or may not make your life easier.

First on deck we’ve got Zemanta, available as a WordPress plugin or, for those not using WordPress or unable to install plugins, it’s also available as an extension for Firefox. Zemanta will automatically search for contextualy related articles, links, images, and videos avaialbe under Creative Commons licences or fair use, or lets you search for an image of whatever you want, say a cat. Notice the fancy popup attributions?

Zemanta takes a lot of the headache out of finding and attributing content and images for your blog and suggests other blogs that have written about similar content to make researching faster.

I’ve also been using Prism by Mozilla Labs. I’ve been using it to run Web2.0 sites like Google Reader and my WordPress control panel. Prism gives you a clean, fast, stand alone environment to run them the same way you would run any desktop application. Prism makes it easy to keep web applications open that you use all the time such as your RSS reader or Hootsuite.

Finally I’d like to make a quick mention to Incollector, a free program I use to keep track of notes, ideas, and references with a searchable and tagable database.

What programs do you use to make your daily life easier?