theTechnophile

I’m finding increasing interest in the possibilities raised by mobile communications and devices. A survey by Informa Telecoms and Media estimated that there would be over 3 billion mobile phone subscribers throughout the world by the end of 2007. The fastest growing markets are in India, China, Africa and Latin America where slightly older fashioned phones are extremely popular.

Old they may be, but being capable of accessing the Internet has been a basic feature of Western mobile phones for sometime, so these older phones should be able to manage it. Lets face it, when I first regularly started surfing the Web I was using a 75MHz Pentium. Almost any phone sports a far higher specification than that venerable machine. Indeed, if you ignore graphics, most modern phones have a performance close to that seen in desktops only a few years ago.

Even if most of that audience doesn’t subscribe to a package that provides data transfer, and I don’t yet, that’s still a very large potential audience. It started me wondering whether the mobile phone, handheld, smartphone or whatever you want to call the device could become the principle way of accessing the Web in the future.

The personal computer.

As I said above, these devices already have the performance edge on what I considered to be my PC a relatively short time ago… albeit in real everyday world terms. They are capable of running a wide range of applications up to and including Microsoft Windows and Office. Combined with some data services available today rivalling the speed provided by mainstream boardband, let alone dial-up networking, and you’ve got a powerful computing tool.

So why aren’t I using one?

Because there are a few hurdles to jump first.

1. The price for data transfer and internet access charged by major networks is far too high, but the indications are that it’s going to fall soon.
2. User interaction is limited by a couple of features:
   • User input is difficult with a phone keyboard, especially if your old like me.
   • Small screens limit the amount of data that can usefully be displayed.

Navigation and user interaction can be simplified and using web standards for website design, improving accessibility on a small screen and useless keyboard.

The download size of mobile websites can be minimised to reduce use of your expensive bandwidth and improve speed. Is this just like the old days of the Web or what?

Ultimately, I think that the mobile Web will be built on web applications customised for mobile devices. The functionality and presentation of these applications could be optimised for mobile users, but more importantly they will be designed to specific jobs for a mobile audience.

For example: Ever used Google Maps to get directions before going on a trip? In the future I bet it will integrate with your phone’s GPS function to guide you there whilst finding you the phone number to let them know your on your way.

I’ve been reading about the future of the fuel cell car and this got me thinking about the whole topic of energy for mobile devices, including large ones like cars.

I started by ignoring the energy cost associated with manufacturing the different devices. This is clearly insane if your trying to properly assess the environmental merits of a particular technology. The whole life cycle cost must be included for a full environmental impact analysis, but since I’m mainly interested in the local effects of energy consumption I feel justified in letting myself off this time.

How’s the energy stored?

Not too may options here at the current time, if you want a reliable source of energy.

1. Electrically using a battery or similar device.
2. Chemically in some sort of fuel, probably liquid or gaseous.

Now right here we have the first problem: The electrical energy stored in the battery had to be generated somehow, with the original source probably a chemical fuel as well. Wind, solar and tidal power are also possible sources.

But what about turning it into electricity?

Each of these technologies has it’s own particular impact on the environment; the old adage of there being no free lunches certainly holds true here! Power stations, whether traditional and alternative, will fall a long way short of 100% conversion efficiency. However, generation on a large scale is often more efficient than that on the scale required by individual devices. This is the basis of the idea of centralisation which gave the UK, and other countries, a national power grid.

The grid is a big problem.

Unfortunately, most of the efficiency gained by centralised generation is promptly lost during the transmission of this electricity to where it is needed. Some estimates put the UK grid losses at 10% of total power generated and the more remote the power station, the bigger the problem; bad news for the off-shore wind-farm!

We could convert the energy into liquid or gaseous chemicals for transportation, negating the grid losses, but this action is also very inefficient. This is essentially where the hydrogen or methanol for fuel cells would have to be produced, converting fossil or nuclear fuels into another type of chemical fuel source.

So it’s just a question of where we burn the fuel.

Do we burn it remotely and move the energy, in either electrical or chemical form, or just move the original fuel and burn it locally?

If your generating power from nuclear fuels it’s a bit of a no brainer. Currently the only safe way to use this fuel is remotely, but the energy released could be used to bring the hydrogen economy to life. Manufacturing hydrogen from water requires a great deal of energy and few other sources would make this economically or environmentally viable. The alternative of creating hydrogen from fossil fuels lacks credibility: Why waste energy doing it?

The answer is to provide a fuel that when burnt releases less harmful pollution locally, but without fully addressing environmental issues on a global scale. This brings me to the numb of the problem regarding the conversion of any hydrocarbon fuel. Most of the alternative systems today are simply less efficient than the best available combustion plant. So if your deriving your energy from fossil sources in the first place, and most of what we use is, this is probably still the way to go.

But it’s a matter of scale and use. Not everyone wants a two-stroke engine attached to their laptop or mobile phone, and in this case batteries have the edge on small fuel cells for me; the main problem being the fuel storage.

Batteries also start to win out is when coupled with local alternative generation technologies. This could be solar panels on your roof or pocket calculator; or a small wind turbine in the garden. This type of distributed power generation has promise, especially in locations without a grid supply and suitable environmental conditions. Batteries also provide the technology behind hybrid vehicles that can charge from electricity generated locally by combustion of fuel. This combines the advantages of both approaches. But, these types of application are where the environmental impact of manufacture raises it’s ugly head. A topic for another day.

Last night I found myself in a bad mood, a very bad mood. It was the kind of mood reserved for server administrators just when it dawns on them that the last action they committed after a long day was a big mistake!

I inadvertently upgraded mysql-server when I’d been carefully trying not to for weeks. I’d read that the upgrade version wasn’t too stable when used on my platform and since the current version worked just fine why fix it? But fixing it was exactly what I did whilst installing another software package, and suffice it to say the rumours were quite correct.

Looking on the bright side, not something for which I’m noted, it gave me the chance to test the effectiveness of the backup scripts and strategy I’d implemented. This type of thing is essential for a systems admin to get right as downtime and the loss of data can be far more disastrous than broken software. I’m glad to say that they appear to have worked well, although this momentary lapse has cost be about six hours of work.

Note to self: Remember to think before hitting the enter key!