theTechnophile

I’ve always loved reading science fiction (sci-fi) and started with the likes of Clarke and Asimov when I was at school. The appeal of some of Clarkes books rested in their quaint view of the future, the tale of a journey to the moon in ‘Prelude to Space’ read long after Armstrong stood on its surface. Still you have to give him credit for writing it more than 20 years before Apollo! Others, such as the 2001 and foundation series, introduced new concepts that remain unrealized today and for some time to come. I think it’s the concepts raised in this type of fiction that I find so fascinating to this day.

My tastes have changed a little, I now read authors such as Banks, Hamilton and Reynolds. The technology they write about has moved on to more closely match the concerns of todays society. The tone also appears to have become darker and I have to admit that it appeals to me. The good and bad guys are often less obvious and this too might reflect modern views, or may be I’m just older and more cynical myself… probably shouldn’t dwell on that too long.

A year or so back, I watched the first episode of a anime sci-fi series on satellite and was intrigued how this shared the dark troubled view of the future. The animation was great and the story line compelling, so I had to watch the rest. Now could I remember the name of this terrific series? Err… no, but its got me interested in the whole sci-fi anime genre. I’ve read good reviews of an anime film called ‘Ghost in the Shell’ adapted from manga created by Masamune Shirow. It appears to follow similar themes to the series watched and is reputed to be satisfyingly dark in its outlook. I think I may have to buy it and see.

Am I being attracted to the dark side through my interest in sci-fi that has become much less like a high tech western? I prefer to think that I have matured to a point where I can admit the fact that which advances are good and which bad is never clear cut and the excitement is in trying to solve the puzzle.

There seems to be a great deal of controversy surrounding the label ‘Web 2.0′. For myself, I’ve only recently noticed that such a thing exists. Personally I’ve been too busy playing with all the new services available on the web these days. You know the ones… for example Wikipedia, del.icio.us, flickr and blogging of course. Then I read Tim O’Reillys article entitled “What Is Web 2.0″ and discovered that I’d probably been participating in Web 2.0 after all!

Is it any good?

My partner, Clare, opened a free account with flickr to accompany her new found interest in photography. This gives me a chance to play around with interesting software and camera gear under the cover of it being ‘her hobby’. I’ve been using this site for a while to find good quality free images and I’ve always been impressed. The images are grouped and tagged to make searching fun and easy. Now I’ve tried uploading images with Clare, it was also apparent how simple Flickr makes this process during uploading. This results in an attractive, user friendly site with powerful search capability.

More recently I’ve opened an account with del.icio.us and I don’t quite understand why I didn’t do it before. Firstly, it allows me to gather useful bookmarks so that I can access them from any computer. I can also keep them private for my use only or open them up to anyone interested. Searching del.icio.us, I’ve already found a few interesting new sites the like of which I’ve been looking for specifically for some time using Google. It would appear that the tagging people use in their bookmarks might have been more specific than Google. Additionally, the huge number of directory sites that inevitably turn up during a Google search never get bookmarked.

I’m also trialling NetNewsWire for the Mac to manage my Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary according to O’Reilly, (RSS) news feeds. Up until now I’ve relied on Safari to do this job and it has been adequate, but I think I’m getting into this enough to justify a more powerful toy… I mean tool. So far I’m reasonably impressed and may continue to use it after my free month. What particularly appealed today was using the del.icio.us and flickr news feeds via NetNewsWire. This has effectively given me a photo album and bookmark file inside my newsreader. NetNewsWire has a pretty good web browser too, so I hardly need anything else!

What’s in a name?

Maybe I’m a little simple, but I’m impressed with how easy these new tools make accessing and sharing information with whom so ever I wish, as long as they have an internet connection. From earlier posts you might be aware that this information sharing idea definitely rings my bell. And that appears to be the nub of the Web 2.0 label, the sharing not the bell ringing! It isn’t about amazing new technology or a reconstruction of the internet we’ve come to know and love. It is about a change in thinking and a new approach to the use of what is already well established. It isn’t a replacement for the Web, but an significant extension. For the most part the label, as is usually the case with any label, is purely arbitrary.

I’ve had a household network, both wired and wireless, for quite some time and I keep discovering new uses for it.

A year or so ago it was digitally stored music, you know MP3s and the like. To make it more interesting I decided to combine it with a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. Of course this requires expenditure and my partner might not be too thrilled. The way to proceed was clearly to demonstrate how this musical format had something to offer her… iPod! She walks to work and has always wanted to be able to drown me out with her favourite tracks whenever she likes, so a shiny new iPod shuffle seemed like the way to go. To cut a long story short, it worked. She is now totally sold on anything musical prefixed with an ‘i’. The new NAS has a directory containing all our music library in Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format, the iTunes default, and is accessible for all the machines running iTunes on my network. Additionally, Synology are intending to bring out a firmware upgrade to enable my NAS to operate as an iTunes server.

But what about me?? I don’t always want to have to sit in front of a computer to enjoy the tunes. I want to be able to listen to music too! To this end I’ve been looking a various interesting devices to help me enjoy my music anywhere in my house and garden without the aid of headphones. The number of options on the market today is amazing and the services on offer thanks to wireless networking and ADSL equally so.

Unfortunately, there’s no whole house solution available that will let be enjoy my purchased iTunes collection! You see Apple has a copy protected version of ACC for these and for some reason doesn’t want anything not running iTunes to be able to use them. So, until Apple relents this musical experience is stuck on the desktop! Please change your mind Mr. Jobs, please.

Still the rest of the collection is accessible and the most interesting options?

• Sonos is a genuine wireless whole house audio system. It can access the music files on my NAS and stream it to any player via its own secure wireless network. I could expand the system as I saw fit and supposedly the sound quality is high. You might have guessed that such a system is also relatively expensive, but it looks great.
• The Pinnacle Soundbridge internet radio is pretty much what it says, allowing you to listen to international radio station streams over an internet connection, especially good with a broadband router. It can stream digital audio from a handy computer as well, so I think my NAS would work. This all takes place over you home wireless network which is fine except it can only manage WEP encryption. Call me paranoid, and you wouldn’t be the first, but I prefer something a little stronger these days. WEP seems like a bit of an unnecessary security risk. Also I like the idea of a radio, especially a wireless one, being portable. The Soundbridge needs a mains power supply, so much for portable music in the garden! There is one possibility though… a hugely over-priced alarm clock replacement. Expensive but a lot better than my current grey irritating box.
• Finally, I could use an external USB soundcard to connect my laptop to the living room Hi-Fi, but that only solves the problem in the living room. I don’t think the neighbours would enjoy this version of whole house audio.

And I’ve only been talking about audio. The world of multimedia is even more stuffed full of spectacular toys which will require much, much more research. I may be struggling to find the solution to my musical dilemma, but looking is too much fun to miss out on. Making protected ACC more widely accessible would remove the last fly from my ointment. But persuasive though my earlier plea might be I think I might be in for a long wait.

Data, data everywhere.

The availability and manipulation of information is a key factor in the development of society. The modern era has seen significant advances, with technologies such as printing, radio and television providing access to ever increasing amounts of data. The mass adoption of the internet has increased the rate at which data can be disseminated. However, the proliferation of information sources has also made separating the wheat from the chaff increasingly difficult. Apart from the obvious trouble with knowing who to trust, huge quantities of data make it much harder to find what you want. We all use search engines and know that finding what you really want is not as easy as might be assumed.

And the future?

The future is likely to see even greater levels of information integration using the internet as a robust media. The boundary between desktop and web applications is already blurred and I suspect that this trend will continue. Web applications will become less about presenting information and the desktop itself will become increasingly integrated with the web. The kind of service-oriented architectures (SOA) used on the web today will become increasingly common. Our personal computing may take place on a relatively low powered machine leveraging the services provided on much more powerful distributed servers of the type already common on the internet. These machines may store our data remotely and securely, whilst others provide access to databases around the globe.

“Results 1 - 10 of about 424,000,000 for whatever you wanted”.

Unless there are advances in the way we handle all these data, there’ll be a lot of browsing to do. One path is the spread of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) that has so far given us RSS and Atom feeds, without which a blog wouldn’t be a blog. XML is similar to the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) that has been behind websites for years, but it also provides the ability to define custom tags. These can be used to describe the type of data contained between the opening and closing tags. In this manner a single text document can provide information about data and the structure of these data. This is what takes us closer to the goal of having a document that can be read by humans and machines alike. Widespread adoption would give rise to the Semantic Web.

Great where does that get us?

Once data can be fully understood be machines as well as us humans, we can delegate the task of filtering all those hits to our machines. Why not? Not only are they far quicker at this sort of thing, but they don’t get bored doing it! Well… not yet they don’t, but what if we have to use artificial intelligence in order to enable these machines to understand the meaning of that for which they are searching? And you thought you argued with your computer now!

I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction recently, the likes of Iain M. Banks, Peter F. Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds and Neal Asher. Their vision of the future, at least in their novels, all include some form of nanotechnology. This is incredible stuff! It can keep you alive and well, resurrect you should you be clumsy enough to let yourself get killed in the first place and even morph you into something else all together. Now if that isn’t enough to catch the attention of a true technophile nothing is.

Curiosity truly aroused, I wondered what can this nanotechnology really do… other than turning me into an indestructible killing machine or something really scary? Nanotechnology has seen a lot of hype during its emergence, but this is common for all new technology. The cycle normally starts with huge exaggeration leading to over expectation, through deep disappointment to the point where actually useful stuff is produced. The funny part is that by then nobody notices anymore, but this doesn’t make the advances any less dramatic.

After some reading, it would appear that the most suitable term for this emerging science is mesotechnology. This covers a much wider range of scale from the more familiar world of millimeters (thousandths of inches if your from the US) down to atomic scales. Surprisingly some of the fiction would seem to be true. Amongst the fields of research one of the most popular is medical science. Yes, they really are trying to develop technology that can spot, prevent or repair damage caused by disease from within your body. It also turns out that nanotechnology is already in everyday use from automotive catalytic convertors to self cleaning windows. As you might expect the military are funding work to develop a batch of weapons, body armour and other goodies, but their tank shells already use highly reactive nano-particles for extra effect.

As with all new materials there are concerns regarding possible harmful effects to the environment due to exposure. This is not ’scare mongering’ as some researchers suggest, but neither is it the impending disaster of the environmental lobby. Even a confirmed technophile can see, and has experienced, that a cautious approach is usually the best with any new technology. However, this is definitely an area at which I need to take a much closer look.