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Technology’s Infestation of my Life

Examples of how technology has permeated every single bit of my life.

Practical Example of Technology Advances of the Last Ten Years

Ten years ago, I walked into high school with a brand new Toshiba Satellite 2210 CDT. It wasn’t state-of-the-art, but it was pretty decent for its time. It had a 500 MHz Intel Celeron processor, 64 MB of RAM, and a 6 GB hard drive (which took up about 62.9 cm3, or 0.1 GB/cm3). The laptop had a 12.1″ 800×600 display and outside measured dimensions of 31.5 cm x 26.2 cm x 4.8 cm for a volume of 3960 cm3. It cost around $2000 at retail.

Today, I walk around with my Motorola Droid. It has a 550 MHz ARM Cortex A8 processor, 256 MB of RAM, and a 16 GB solid state memory chip (only 0.165 cm3, or 96.97 GB/cm3; which is almost 1000 times more dense than the hard drive in my laptop!) The display is 3.7″ 854 x 480 resolution. The phone measures 6.00cm x 11.58cm x 1.370 cm for a volume of 95.2 cm3, and cost around $600 at retail1. And it fits in my pocket, and can make phone calls to anyone in the world, and can check email, and can watch videos, and determine my location anywhere in the world down to 4m or so, and I can speak to it and it will do things!

That’s amazing.

  1. assuming you just brought the phone outright with no contract requirements ↩

The New iPhone

Apple has, yet again, released a new iPhone. To no ones surprise, it looks strikingly similar to one that Gizmodo managed to acquire under dubious circumstances, at best, a few months ago. I’m currently oogling how small it is:

Photo by Dean Putney. Released under Creative Commons: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/07/boing-boing-at-the-w.html

My droid comes in a 14mm thick versus the iPhone 4G 9.4mm1, almost a 33% reduction in thickness…that’s notable. Even compared to the iPhone 3G, which measures 12.3mm thick, it’s about a 24% reduction.

The Apple A4 also makes an appearance in the updated iPhone, which I think is interesting given Apple’s history with Motorola and now Intel. Could they be looking to dump Intel and produce there own CPUs?

Photo by Dean Putney. Released under Creative Commons: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/07/boing-boing-at-the-w.html

Apparently, I’ve also been going about dating wrong:

Photo by Dean Putney. Released under Creative Commons: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/07/boing-boing-at-the-w.html

  1. if you are to believe the Gizmodo measurements ↩

How Any Enginerd Can Date a Beautiful Woman

Ignite Seattle 10 is coming up just around the corner on June 14th, so mark your calendars. They had a call for submissions and I thought, “What the heck. But what to present on? It needs to be funny, but also relevant. And not a shill for some product.”

As it turned out, I had already asked this question from the last time I wanted to present at Ignite Boulder. I flipped through the comments and decided that Jeff’s suggestion on How Any Man Can Pick Up Beautiful Women would be good starting point.

I submitted my topic suggestion with the following description:

I am a nerd, and I am an engineer.

How do I know this? Because I was drawing schematics of Star Trek related devices when I was in 5th grade, I ran my own web server from my home when I was in 9th grade, and, most importantly, I just (well, a year ago) graduated from the Colorado School of Mines with a BS in Engineering, Specialty in Electrical Systems, Area of Special Interest in Mechanical Systems.

Now, I work for an aerodefensespace1 corporation, as an engineer.

And I’m dating a beautiful woman; actually, that’s not quite true.

But I have learned a lot about being an enginerd and being able to talk to women. And have them talk to me.

So, just because I haven’t found the “love of my life,” the Deanna Troi to my Will Riker, doesn’t mean that you can’t benefit from what I’ve learned.

It’s a shoe-in to win, right? Not quite. Unfortunately, I was not selected for the round of Ignite talks (they had a record number of entries). So you’ll have to wait for now.2

  1. I thought about shortening this to “aerodeface” ↩

  2. Story of my life…. ↩

Preposterous Voice Transcriptions

I use Google Voice for all my voicemail needs. One of the cool features, in theory, is that it will transcribe a voicemail left for me and send it to my phone or email. This is great when I’m in a meeting or in class and can’t actually listen to the voicemail, but I can glance at it. Unless of course, the transcription goes completely awry. As in this case:

Hey Drew, this is Karen me and my daughter give me a give me a kiss on Saturday and she wanted to go if you can do it would be great. We can go ahead and yeah call or on that, so if you to call. It’s going to come back number is (206) 555-12121 bye.

The voicemail was actually my friend (a guy, by the way) calling to see if I wanted to go skiing on Saturday.

  1. the phone number was practically the only thing the transcription service actually got correct ↩

Do you want to scan and fix YUKON (I:)? No, go away.

I had this really annoying box pop up whenever I plugged by iPod into my computer that said, “Do you want to scan and fix YUKON (I:)?” It happened when I was running Windows Vista and it happened when I was running Windows 7. It took a half second to click, which means is wasn’t annoying enough for me to do anything about for the longest time, despite the fact that it drove me nuts.

Fortunately, Mark Flavin has the answer to why it was doing this annoying behavior and how to fix it:

From www.futureofrealestatetechnology.com:

The reason for the error is that his IPOD was formatted FAT32 on Windows XP; this can affect thumbdrives, cameras, smart cards. What happens is the device was not properly dismounted by Windows XP and there is an archival bit set that Vista needs to reset before it will stop reporting there is an error.

Read the solution over at Resolve Vista Scan and Fix Error When Plugging in IPOD or other Devices

Getting Touchpad to Work with Windows 7

I’ve been using Windows 7 on my Toshiba M700 Tablet since the RTM was available on MSDN a couple of months ago. And it’s been great! No kidding. There were a handful of drivers I needed to download from Toshiba, but everything just works, except for the mouse.

Well, that’s not entirely true. The mouse works just fine. It’s all the special features that don’t work. And that’s not the fault of Microsoft, it’s the fault of Toshiba for not having the needed drivers.

Today though, I got sick of it. One of my biggest issues is that while I’m typing, my hands are very near the touchpad, practically on top. And more often than not, I’ll ever so gently catch the touchpad with my palm, and reposition the cursor. It drives me nuts. Fortunately it hasn’t been an issue because most of the time my tablet is docked at home. However, now that I’m on vacation and using it on the go, it’s been a huge issue.

The solution was easy though. After searching through some forums, several people noted that version 7.2.303.107 of the Alps Pointing Device Driver was working for people using all sorts of laptops with Windows 7 (including Dells).

The best place I found to get it was from the Toshiba Drivers Download Site for the Portege A600. Select “Touchpad” from the categories and click “Alps Pointing Device Driver (32/64bit) (v7.2.303.107; 10-06-2008; 7M)” from the results. It’s designed for Vista 32-/64-bit, however I’m using it on Windows 7 64-bit just fine.

Problem solved!

The Day The Music Died

Yahoo! is shutting down GeoCities today. A little known fact is that I used to have a web presence on GeoCities. In fact, it’s still there! I’ve checked back a couple times a year to see if it was still up and running it, and it always was.

Starbase 1561 was the place I used to call home before I started hosting my website on my own server. Today, though, will be our last day to actually view it in it’s native habitat2.

While you’re at it, you might want to check out XKCD’s front page, an awesome homage to my middle school and high school coding days3:
xkcd

  1. Last updated 05/30/01 12:19 PM Pacific Daylight Time ↩

  2. I made an archival copy a couple of years ago ↩

  3. Well, not mine exclusively…but you get the idea ↩

The Droid

I’ve had my current phone, an LG VX8300 for over two years now. It basically does what I need it to, make and receive phone calls and text messages. But I’ve been itching for more.

I’ve watched as the iPhone was introduced1, reintroduced2, and re-reintroduced3. I also watched as AT&T’s network and lack of infrastructure continues to collapse under the pressure.

Last Christmas, I watched as Verizon rolled out the Blackberry Storm, hoping that this would be the device that would rival the iPhone; it wasn’t.

I watched as Google released the Android operating system and T-Mobile, of all companies, grabbed the G1. Amazing, I thought.

Well, now the day could be mine to have and everyone else’s turn to watch. Verizon is launching the Droid. And I’m thinking, “This could be cool.”

It does pretty much everything I’d want it to, including being awesome. In particular, it has WiFi and Bluetooth, a decent screen, replaceable battery, and the latest Android operating system – codename: Eclair4. Mmmm, doughnuuuut.

What else: 16GB of internal memory with expansion support, 256MB RAM, and support for running multiple applications at once.

The Android app market should also be pretty well stocked, and I’m probably savvy enough to write any app myself that I can’t find. So like I said, “This could be cool.”

I hope they get this right.

  1. Original iPhone ↩

  2. iPhone 3G ↩

  3. iPhone 3G S ↩

  4. Yes, as in the doughnut ↩

Moving iTunes

In preparation for my trip, I wanted to move my entire iTunes library computer from my tablet (Daedalus) to my netbook (Nautilus) so I could listen to music while I was traveling. Unfortunately, I’m of the anal-retentive type when it comes to managing my music. Specifically, I must keep track of my play counts and ratings. I have no idea what I’m like this way, it’s my thing, just go with it.

I decided the best way to this would be to copy my entire iTunes folder over the wired-network, essentially duplicating my entire music library on my netbook, which is the computer I’ll be bringing for my trip. I used TeraCopy to move the files, which took about two hours. I get the files onto Nautilus, but then I run into a bit of trouble with iTunes.

iTunes keeps thinking the music files are located in C:\Users\AndrewFerguson\Music\iTunes, however, for various reasons, I’ve put them onto the D drive at D:\iTunes. After dinking around1 for a while with iTunes, trying get my music, play counts, ratings, playlists, and podcasts all imported, I conclude that iTunes will not be helping me in this endeavor and that I’ll either need to put the music into C:\Users\AndrewFerguson\Music\iTunes, which I can’t do for various reasons (including the fact that I don’t have enough space on that partition), or just reimportant my music and lose all my beloved data.

To me, neither of these solutions is adequate. Then I have a stroke of genius. I remember that *NIX systems have something called symbolic links or symlink, for short:
From en.wikipedia.org:

A symbolic link merely contains a text string that is interpreted and followed by the operating system as a path to another file or directory. It is a file on its own and can exist independently of its target. If a symbolic link is deleted, its target remains unaffected. If the target is moved, renamed or deleted, any symbolic link that used to point to it continues to exist but now points to a non-existing file. Symbolic links pointing to non-existing files are sometimes called orphaned or dangling.

The only question remain was: Would Windows XP Home support my cunning plan? As it turns out, the answer is yes! Although it took a bit of massaging.

First, I had to download a program from SysInternals called Junction. This brings up a side note, what everyone else calls symlinks, Microsoft calls junctions. I don’t know why, they just do.

Second, I had to create the C:\Users\AndrewFerguson\Music\ file structure, which is basically just a bunch of empty folders. Not a huge deal and only a minor inconvienence.

Finally, I opened up a command prompt and typed in

junction c:\Users\AndrewFerguson\Music\iTunes\ D:\iTunes\

and got the following response:

Created: c:\Users\AndrewFerguson\Music\iTunes\
Targetted at: D:\iTunes\

I fired up iTunes and my music played! When I’m done at the end of my trip, I can just copy the iTunes Library file back and all my ratings and play counts will remain intact.

  1. yes, that’s the technical term ↩