awkward.org T & M - Thoughts & Musings

Sigur Ros have a new concert/documentary movie coming out (when I’m not quite sure) called Heima. It’s largely shot on a recent tour of Iceland - sort of a ‘coming home’ tour, ‘Heima’ is Icelandic for Home.There’s a trailer here - even if you’re not a fan of Sigur Ros’ music it’s got some wonderful photography of Icelands great landscapes and scenery. It bought back some great memories of the short trip Michele and I had there a couple of years ago.

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Seem’s like Verizon is in a bit of a battle over a FIOS installation that went wrong in Needham.

My install was nowhere near as complicated (or incendiary). You’d think that the tech would know to be careful when drilling, after all in nearly every home the Phone (Fibre), and Electrical house ingress points are very close to each other.

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I think I can scoop my brother with this one New Sony Bravia TV Ads to feature multicolor bunnies

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Virgin America received permission to begin operating in the US recently. Artur Bergman at O’Reilly has an article about the tech in the planes.

Although they’re currently only offering a limited service between San Francisco, LA, Las Vegas, Washington DC and New York I’m definately looking forward to Boston being added to that list. Virgin fairly well shook up the UK airline industry and I’m looking forward to them doing something similar here in the US, more competition (even for JetBlue whom I really like) is always a good thing.

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According to Engadget’s HD Blog Verizon has begun rolling out the updated FIOS UI to customers. The article says that Indiana, Rhode Island, parts of New Jersey appear to be getting the update first, but hopefully Massachusetts is not far behind (there was no sign of it this morning before I left for work).

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My brother (and father) built a ‘shebo‘ (a cross between a shed and a gazebo) in his yard a year or so ago. I don’t know if he can still enter it for ‘The Shed of the Year Competition‘ or if the competition is only open to construction completed in the past year.

He faces some pretty stiff competition though. This years winner is pretty fancy.

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Chuck Thacker is one of the ‘grey beards’ of the computer industry having performed some splendid engineering and research at both Xerox PARC and Digital’s Palo Alto Research Center. CNet has an interview with him here.

A couple of pieces of the interview struck me :

I’d like to get your thoughts on the quality of computer scientists coming up through the ranks these days.
Thacker: I am actually quite disturbed by this trend. I worked on a project to try to figure out how to actually use computers more effectively in education in the lower grades because a lot of people now work on improving university-level education and maybe high school. That’s not where the problem is. The problem is in the very first exposure of a kid to education. It’s a hard slog because the education market is worse than the medical market in terms of fragmentation.

I wonder what the fragmentation is ? Does he mean in terms of educational approaches ? Hardware suppliers ? Software suppliers ? Too many points of contact with the education market purchasers ?

As a computer scientist, what do you see as the next big challenge, the next big hurdle for computer science?
Thacker:

So we need to look around and see what to do…The tradeoff is that it looks like the manufacturers are going to want to increase the number of processors on one silicon chip rather than increasing their complexity of a single processor. The problem with that is that we don’t know how to program it. We just aren’t very good at concurrence. One of the things that I say to my academic friends is that–to some extent–this is your fault because we hire a lot of computer science graduates with bachelor’s degrees. They have not learned anything about parallel programming.

The challenge of parallelism is undoubtedly one of the biggest hurdles the software industry needs to face. At university I worked with Transputers and Occam however that approach still didn’t succeed in part due to the fact that it was still too complicated (and in part due to British Technology Companies general failings). At Be we had a much lower processor count but still struggled with explaining to developers how to handle multi-threaded programming and concurrency. Now with multi-core CPUs the problem is becoming even more pressing and it’s certainly something that we’re challenged by at my current employer.

There needs to be continued research in the areas of concurrency, with a genuine focus on both the abstract science problems and on the practicalities of using the technology in todays software engineering projects. It might just be that Google has some of the most to gain from this and can in turn devote some considerable (hopefully public) research in the area. Google’s data-centers now contain many thousands of CPU cores all essentially working in parallel to perform work - admittedly the relatively constrained problem of search, but it’s a beginning.

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Over on the Verizon FIOS Website they have a preview of the new User Interface they plan to roll out to their FIOS TV Settop boxes over the next few months.

As a current customer all I can say is ‘about time’. Although the current UI is remarkably ’snappy’ in comparison to the UI on many cable settop boxes (my experience with older Comcast offerings comes to mind) it’s still pretty poorly designed and implemented.

In particular the current search functionality is frustratingly bad, it’s slow and rarely actually seems to find the program you want since it seems to do a string search on programs that start with the phrase you enter not merely contain it. Furthermore prepositions like ‘The’ seem to either be placed at the end or dropped entirely. So searching for ‘State’ may or may not find ‘The State Within‘ since it could be listed as ‘State Within, The’ or just ‘State Within’. If nothing else the new search mechanism looks like it’s substring based and should find the program no matter how it’s listed.

The new keyboard navigation/text entry mechanisms look like an improvement too. It’s funny by the current horizontal layout of the onscreen keyboard just seems much slower to use than TIVO’s vertical layout, the new UI looks to adopt a vertical layout - hopefully that’s an improvement too.

It’s not been deployed yet to my home - but as soon as it is I’ll try and write a mini-review.

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My parents have had their fair share of Oil Tanker fires under/on Freeways in the Tampa area over the last few years. Now it’s been the San Francisco Bay Area’s turn. There’s a photo here, and some more spectucular photos of the inferno here. The Google map for the area is here.

Needless to say this morning - and every morning’s commute in the East Bay is going suck.

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Although the beginning of last week was barely above 40 degrees here, the end of the week (and today) it’s been much more like 80 degrees !

Starting last Friday when it got much warmer there was a lot of noise from the wildlife in our garden, the surrounding homes and nearby Middlesex Fells. At first I thought it sounded a lot like Cicada’s which I’m used to hearing in California, but in fact the noise is frogs. Known locally a Spring Peepers but more formally as Pseudacris crucifer they make quite a racket and keep it going for most of the night (I’ve not yet waited up so late as to see when they might stop - but they’re usually still going at midnight).

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