Technology – Page 14 – Into the Woods

Browser wars

Once upon a time, in the innocent early days of Web browsing, it was pop-up ads that drove us crazy. Browsers responded by including built-in pop-up blockers. That helped, for a while.

But advertising fiends are always going to find new ways of annoying us with ads we don’t want to see, trying to sell us stuff that we have absolutely no interest in. Pop-up blockers are unable to block pop-up ads created by embedding Javascript in the HTML. And for a truly annoying Web-browsing experience, there’s nothing quite so annoying as a Javascript pop-up containing a Flash ad. I call these ads “stomp-overs.”

What’s Flash? Adobe Flash is used by Web designers to create ads and web pages that are much fancier than what one can do in plain old HTML. For example, Flash ads may contain animations, or video. Flash ads also burn up your bandwidth while this unwanted video is downloaded, and they keep your computer’s processor busy rendering the Flash. Flash also consumes a good bit of your computer’s available memory.

Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, hates Flash and refused to support it on the iPad. Way to go! Jobs even took the unusual step of posting an essay on the Apple web site explaining his arguments against Flash.

Luckily, there are ways to block Flash. There’s Flashblock for the Firefox family and ClickToFlash for Apple’s Safari. For Internet Explorer, I believe it’s possible to disable Flash by changing some browser settings. I have not tested this in Internet Explorer.

Some advice to other Macintosh users: I have had more memory problems since upgrading to OS X 10.6.3 (Snow Leopard). The new Safari 5 also seems to be a bit of a memory hog. I’ve decided I’m going to have to add memory to my iMac to take it from 1GB to 4GB.

Stomp-over No. 1: This type of evil ad, common at Salon, throws up a Flash ad and grays out the rest of the page. You can’t proceed until you click the close box. In this example, the content of the Flash ad is being suppressed by Flashblock in the Google Chrome browser.

Stomp-over No. 2: This annoying little ad slides down onto the middle of the page. You have to find and click the close box to make it go away.

American cable and broadband: A ripoff

A screen shot from the web site of Orange SA, a French telecom company

Periodically I check broadband costs in France, just to see how badly we have fallen behind in the United States. In France, you can get a package that includes Internet service, television, and telephone for 34.90 euros — about $45 — no contract required. For this money, you get up to 20 megabits download speed on your Internet connection, up to 100 television channels, and unlimited domestic and international calling on your telephone. Why is this?

Most Americans know very little about other countries and are conditioned to think that the United States is ahead of the rest of the world in technology. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In addition, Americans preach the virtues of competition, but we don’t practice what we preach. In France, rates are lower and service is better because of intense competition. In the United States, the rules are set by a Congress that is in the pockets of the big Telecom companies (not to mention the banks). Though the FCC is just now finally getting around to developing a national broadband policy, for the last 10 years nothing has happened except that the telecom corporations cooperated with government to exploit consumers and make the telecoms rich.

If Americans were better informed, I have no doubt that they’d be pretty angry. For 10 years they’ve been kicked around by the cable companies and telecoms. Everyone complains, but few realize that it didn’t have to be that way. Next time you hear someone use the words “business friendly,” ask them if that doesn’t translate to “friendly to the ripping off of the American population.”

By some odd irony, as I was researching French telecom costs this afternoon, my cell phone rang. It was Verizon, wondering why I haven’t “upgraded” my telephone. They want to give me a cheap new phone to get me to sign a two-year contract. Ha! I’ve never had a contract with Verizon, either on my cell phone or on my Internet service. These contracts are a major way that American telecoms prevent people from taking advantage of what little competition there is. I steadfastly refuse to sign a contract. And besides, why would I want a cheap, flashy phone when my three-year-old Motorola M800 works just fine. My Motorola phone is a serious phone with a serious antenna (hear that, iPhone?) that retailed for about $700, though I bought mine cheap on eBay. There’s no way I’d trade that phone for a new piece-of-junk phone (even if my Motorola M800 does weigh 10 pounds.)

Clearly Verizon is making a push right now to try to lure people into renewing their contracts. I’ve had several pieces of junk mail about that, and today there was the sales call. As the sales person gave me her pitch, I could hear a chorus of people in the background also making pitches. If Verizon is making a big push to lock people into contracts, what does that tell us?

It tells us that Verizon is expecting some kind of competition in the next two years that threatens to cut into their profits. Verizon has a gross profit margin of 60.18 percent. That’s predatory, and that’s what happens when corporations control a “business friendly” Congress and write their own regulations.

A candle in the wind, a whisper on the air

Wikipedia

I hope the non-nerds will excuse another nerd post. But because of some of the email I get, I know that some of the readers here are nerds…

As we contemplate the fact that we are all energy hogs (you do contemplate that fact, don’t you?), I think it’s interesting to remind ourselves just how much can be accomplished with small amounts of energy. Let’s use an example from radio. To us modern digital folks, radio may seem like old stuff, antique almost. But all of our favorite toys depend on radio, from iPhones to WiFi.

Musicians are familiar with the concept of the octave. Octaves have to do with the doubling of a frequency. A piano keyboard, for example, covers seven octaves of sound. The human ear can hear about 10 octaves of sound. We can apply the concept of the octave to any phenomenon where wave forms and frequency are involved. This includes, of course, electromagnetic energy. If you go up about 40 octaves from the piano keyboard, you arrive at the frequency of light. The human eye can perceive less than an octave of light. Red light is the lowest frequency of light we can perceive; violet is the highest.

In between the frequencies of sound and light is radio, in a frequency range of 3,000 cycles per second (3 kilohertz, or 3 kHz) to 300 billion cycles per second (300 gigahertz, or 300 GHz). That’s a lot of octaves. What’s amazing about radio is that different frequencies travel around the earth in very different ways. For example, the frequency of radio waves emitted by your cell phone (around 1 GHz), can’t travel very far, because it can’t (usually) bend with the earth’s curvature or bounce back down to earth off the earth’s ionosphere. On the other hand, radio frequencies up to about 30 megahertz (30 mHz) can travel all the way around the earth under the right conditions, even with very little energy.

A candle is better at producing heat, actually, than light. A candle produces a meager 13 lumens of light and 40 watts of heat! That’s a huge amount of heat energy. And, by the way, the average human body runs on about 100 watts of energy, of which the brain consumes a fifth — 20 watts. The brain burns less energy than a candle. And though the energy used by the human body is a tiny fraction of the energy used by our cars, our bodies are not excellent examples of energy frugality.

Compare the energy richness of the sun with the energy frugality of the moon. The sun’s radiation produces about 342 watts per square meter on the earth’s surface, on average, during the course of a year. By comparison, the energy on the earth’s surface from the moon (per square meter) is only about a thousandth of a watt. To generate 1 watt of electricity from moonlight would require about 3,200 square meters of solar panels. But we can still see the moon perfectly well, can’t we?

As I proved to myself today, a signal can travel from North Carolina to Switzerland using substantially less energy than the energy produced by a candle. Beacons I transmitted today using less than 2 watts of power were heard in Switzerland, the Netherlands, England, Italy, and, of course, California. One of the reasons this is possible is because I used a digital, computer-generated mode of data communication that is extremely slow, efficient, and noise resistant. This mode is called “WSPR,” pronounced “whisper.” It takes almost 2 minutes to transmit this much text in the beacon: “K9WQ EM86wk 30.” The first four characters, K9WQ, are my FCC call sign. “EM96wk” is shorthand for my approximate location. The “30” is the amount of power I used, represented as decibels, and equals less than 2 watts.

That seems like magic to me.

I wanted to calculate how many watts of energy are in the sound of a human being shouting. I don’t quite know how to do that calculation, but I’m sure that plenty of people can shout louder than 2 watts. That’s one of the reasons I don’t watch television. I’d rather whisper on the radio.

Who I heard, and who heard me

Recovered photos

The motherboard of a 12-year-old computer: somewhere you don’t want to go

What if your computer crashed today and couldn’t be restarted? What would you lose? There is no costless way to back up your computer. Probably the easiest and least expensive plan is to periodically burn CDs or data DVDs of files you don’t want to lose.

Back in the late 1990s, when I was working for the San Francisco Examiner (may it rest in peace), I sent my older sister a quite fine computer that was being retired by the Examiner — a Hewlett Packard Kayak XA. The PC had been in the office of a former publisher of the Examiner, Lee Guittar, so the computer was executive-suite squeaky clean. My sister used this computer until about three years ago, when the computer was damaged by an ugly power failure in which the power went on and off several times in quick succession. The computer went to the garage, and my sister got an iMac.

A week or so ago, my sister brought the computer to me. I had promised to see if I could revive it. When powered on, the computer would emit a series of beeps and then go silent. I have the technical documentation for the computer, and I knew that the beep codes probably indicated a problem with the BIOS on the system board. But my attempts to reflash the BIOS using the procedure in the technical manual failed. If there was any hope for reviving the computer, a new mother board would be needed.

What would we do without eBay. There was a mother board for sale with exactly the right part number, for $20 plus $15 shipping. I bought it. After I installed the new mother board, the old PC booted with almost no further drama.

My sister had kept things well organized. Everything of interest was pretty much in three folders — “Pictures,” “Pictures 2”, and “Recipes.”

I’m trying to decide what to do with my refurbished HP Kayak XA mini-tower computer. It’s pretty slow by today’s standards. But I’ll at least keep it as relic of the San Francisco Examiner days. The computer still has an Examiner property tag on it.

Here is a sampling of the photos which were almost lost.

San Francisco, looking across the bay from Point Bonita. My mother and sister used to make annual trips to San Francisco. Several of these photos were taken on those trips.

Mendocino County, California, along Highway 1. In Ireland those rocks would be called skelligs.

My sister’s deviled eggs, looking very Southern

Loaves of bread made by my sister

I believe this is some sort of apple pastry, made by my sister

A pie, made by my sister

The Hillsville Diner, Hillsville, Virginia. It’s about 40 miles northwest of here.

Inside the Hillsville diner

That’s me serving pinto beans from the wood cookstove. The stove is in a house that my sister and mother and I stayed in on a visit to Mendocino County. During the 1970s and 1980s, two of the old houses I lived in had wood cookstoves in them. I’m very skilled at cooking on a wood stove. Notice the gas stove behind me. We had ’em both going.

That’s me, doing a very unprofessional job of cracking oysters in Inverness, California. The oysters came (of course) from the Hog Island Oyster Company on Tomales Bay. As for the oysters, we fried ’em in batter.

A couple of times when my mother and sister came to San Francisco, we stayed at the Chicken Ranch cottage at Inverness, California, right beside Tomales Bay. In spite of its humble name, the Chicken Ranch cottage was at the time an outpost of Manka’s Lodge. This photo is taken from the backyard of the Chicken Ranch cottage.

This is my sister and I, before the premiere of a Sharon Stone film in San Francisco. My boss at the San Francisco Examiner, Phil Bronstein, was married to Sharon Stone during that epoch, and so I got invitations like that. What an era: the thrill of the dot-com boom, grief for the end of the Examiner, and some Hollywood glamour thrown in.

Whole-house surge protector

I finally have a whole-house surge protector, something I’ve wanted for a long time. It’s possible to buy these things and have an electrician install it, but my electric company offers them for $9.95 a month, with installation, and a warranty, included.

The surge protector installs under the meter. It took the technician only a couple of minutes to install it. The warranty will pay for the repair or replacement of anything damaged by lightning (or any kind of power surge) that gets through this surge protector. The warranty covers each damaged device for up to $5,000, or a total of up to $50,000 per incident. One of the advantages of a whole-house surge protector is that it can protect the big stuff such as the heat pump, refrigerator, washing machine, etc. It’s a good idea to keep the small surge protector installed at computers, etc., to give them double protection.

I hope this makes me feel a little more secure during the summer lightning storms. I know how much damage lightning can do…

Radio in the age of Twitter?

The map shows the locations of the stations whose beacons I heard (or who heard mine) Friday afternoon.

National Public Radio had a story this week on how ham radio is growing in the age of Twitter. Not only is ham radio very much alive, hams are always figuring out new things to do with radio and computers.

I recently discovered a new digital communications mode invented by hams called WSPR — Weak Signal Propagation Reporter. The idea is to have a computer-controlled radio listen for (and transmit) low-power digital beacons on certain frequencies. The power could be as low as 1 watt. But because the data carried on this signal is intentionally transmitted at such a slow speed, the signal is very reliable, even a weak signal in the presence of noise. It takes almost two minutes to transmit only enough data to give the identity of the transmitting station, its location, and the amount of power used. Error correction is used to make copying the signal more reliable. So a tiny amount of power goes a long way.

The computer completely automates the process, listening and periodically transmitting. Every two minutes, it tells you whose beacons you heard. The computer also uploads this list of who it heard to a web site where all the data is collected. On this web site, you can see a map that shows who can hear whom all over the world.

Modern ham radios, by the way, have interfaces that allow them to be controlled by computers. Computer programs also can create audio to send to the transmitter, and interpret audio from the receiver. This is how computers encode and deocode digital signals that are transmitted as sound on the radio.

Using 3 watts of power, my beacon was heard from New England to California. I raised the power to 30 watts for only two beacon transmissions, and I was heard across the Atlantic, by DK3SML in Germany; G8BKE in England; IV3DXW in Italy; PA3MET in the Netherlands; and 4X1RF in Israel. This was on a frequency of 10.140 Mhz.

Some hams like to work with big antennas on tall towers, and power amplifiers. I find it more challenging (not to mention less expensive) to limit myself to 100 watts and only such antennas as I can hide in my attic. California on 3 watts and Israel on 30 watts — not bad.

Part of what’s fascinating about WSPR mode is that it’s an easy way to test your radio, your antenna, and radio propagation conditions. Leave the computer and radio alone for an hour or two to transmit and receive beacons, then have a look at the list of who heard whom. It answers the question “How far can my signal be heard?”

The program which controls sending and receiving low-power beacons

The methods of 100 years ago

Here is a link to a scanned copy of Henley’s Twentieth Century Formulas, Recipes and Processes. The book, which is in PDF format, is more than 800 pages long and covers just about everything a self-sufficient American in 1914 might need to know — farming, shelter, tools, homemade cosmetics and medicines, preserving food, and so on. The PDF file is more than 100 megabytes. Everything is arranged in alphabetical order.

Remember when people thought Apple was dead?

Vintage 1997: The Power Macintosh 5500

It’s amazing how much abuse Macintoshes used to take from people who thought that Microsoft should, and would, rule the world. I put up with this for virtually my entire career in newspaper publishing. But without, I hope, being too boastful, I think the entire world now sees what we technology heretics saw decades ago.

I offer as evidence a piece I wrote in the San Francisco Examiner on Jan. 12, 1997. Because the Examiner closed in 2000 and its staff merged with the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle, this piece is now in the archive of the San Francisco Chronicle. The article’s headline is: “Next Up for Apple: Saved by Unix?”

What had happened then was that, in December 1996, Apple acquired NeXT, the company Steve Jobs had started after he was ousted from Apple in 1985. In July 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as CEO and started Apple’s Renaissance, including the development of the current Mac OS X operating system.

My article in the Examiner was published on a Sunday. Apple’s stock price the Friday before was $17.62 a share. As of today the share price is about $196, more than 11 times higher. In this piece, I argued that Apple was now on the right track, technically. However, I took no position on whether Apple’s technical strategy would succeed in the market, because the market is so fickle and Microsoft was so predatory.

That article, by the way, was noticed by investors and was widely cited. I, however, didn’t have the good sense to buy Apple stock.

I might also mention that, in my role as editorial systems director for the Examiner, I had the opportunity to talk with Gil Amelio when he came in to meet with the Examiner’s editorial board. This was during Amelio’s last months as Apple CEO, just before Steve Jobs returned as CEO. Amelio, in my opinion, deserves far more credit for Apple’s turnaround than he is generally given. I also had the opportunity to participate in a workshop with Apple’s human interfaces design team when they were designing and testing the look and feel of Mac OS X.

Remember when NASA used to thrill us with space age technology? No more. These days, who does, other than Apple? To build the beautiful human interface of Mac OS X on top of a Unix (FreeBSD) was an amazing feat.

Still, to my mind, the greatest computer operating system ever developed is Sun’s Solaris, a true Unix. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems last month. I hope Oracle respects what they now own.

From the good old days…

My cherished Selectric III from the San Francisco Examiner

If I had the space and the money, I could happily fill a warehouse with a collection of vintage technology. Typewriter technology, after steady development for at least 150 years, reached its apex in the 1970s with the IBM Correcting Selectric III. I own one of these. I salvaged it from a basement junk pile at the San Francisco Examiner. During the 1970s, newspaper newsrooms were filled with IBM Selectrics. Reporters and editors used them, and the typed pages were sent to the composing room, where the text was scanned from the pages. In those days, computers were too big and too expensive for the desktop, so typewriters still ruled.

The San Francisco Examiner copy desk, c. 1978.

My Selectric still has its Typewritorium sticker. The Typewritorium was made famous by Herb Caen, the columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, because that’s where Caen’s “Loyal Royal” was sent when it needed repairs. Caen’s Loyal Royal is still on display in the Chronicle’s lobby.

A revolution in reading and publishing

And there you have it. Apple’s new iPad is everything we hoped it would be, except that Apple is staying with AT&T for its Internet connection instead of moving to Verizon. All the iPad models will work on local wifi networks, though.

It seems to me that the book publishing industry will now change very quickly. Apple did it right — agreements with a bunch of big publishers, a new iBook application, and support for the ePub format, which democratizes publishing and makes it as easy to make and publish a book as to make a web site.

The biggest surprise was the price. You can get one for as little as $499.