Kindle Update

Kindle usage report update from the Washington Post via  Tele-Read:

–Says the “Sprint-supplied ‘Whispernet’ service,” used for transmitting books, “has major gaps in rural areas, starting as close as 30 miles from the District. Users in the country may need to download books to their computers, then copy them to a Kindle.” In a related vein, see this link kindly supplied by TeleBlog contributor Paul Biba—on the difficulties of using the Whispernet in Montana and other states with no coverage or spotty coverage. Bait-and-switch advertising for their residents? Or are they not reading fine print?

This should not be a surprise - for crying out I called that one out as soon as I saw the actual technical details and I don't live anywhere near Montana..

.. the choice of EV-DO means this is restricted to major population centers in the US.

Shay's TV

I took some pictures while I was helping Shay install his newly acquired 40" Sony Bravia KDL 40W3000 last week that I've been meaning to post. My initial reaction on seeing the box it was delivered in was that it was way too big and Shay had clearly been drinking before he bought it but to be fair to Tank Boy it looks amazing when mounted properly using a good wall bracket.

To give you an idea of scale - the Dell box on the table in the first picture contains a 24" Dell flat panel monitor and it looks minute beside this beast.

The final picture is a full 7meg shot of the TV displaying Shay's X-Box Live console you can click through to Picasa and zoom in to see just how much detail there is on a 1080p display.

Windows Live Writer

Microsoft get a lot of stick for developing and delivering monstrous bloat-ware rather than lean and mean functional software that just does the job. Occasionally though, they really get the balance right and Windows Live Writer is one of those. It's a free (as in beer) lightweight offline blog post editor.

If you don't post articles to blogs often then you may be forgiven for assuming that blog sites must surely support some pretty advanced (i.e. intuitive, easy to use and reliable) post editing features. I don't have much experience in this field but I can tell you that the post editor in Blogger at least is abysmal. Blogger's online editor is only partially WYSIWYG, breaks many of the common user interface conventions and has failed more than enough times for me to get labelled unreliable. Windows Live Writer by contrast is a lightweight and (so far) perfectly reliable offline editor. It integrates incredibly well with a range of Blog sites, including Blogger, and my initial impression is that it is easy to use, accurate and reliable.

It detects your blog's layout and style template(s) and applies them on the fly so you actually get WYSIWYG editing. It allows you to easily edit and republish posts after you realise that you just published complete rubbish and need to fix it. It allows you to manage posting to multiple blog hosts including Blogger, WordPress, Microsoft Live Spaces and more, easily and efficiently.

It appears to have the beginnings of a plug in developer culture kicking off so in addition to the basic Insert Hyperlink\Picture\Video\Table options you can add plugins to support proper Insert Code that preserves the structure of formatted code and Insert Code from Visual Studio that preserves syntax highlighted code. Now if only it supported Insert Code from UltraEdit\Eclipse I'd be away on a hack, but it's light years ahead of the basic options available directly from Blogger.

The only problem with it at the moment is that the main Windows Live Writer site appears to be unavailable at the moment which sort of takes the shine of this. Keep hacking away at it though, if you ever post blog articles then it's worth downloading and using.

The Golden Compass

There may be spoilers ahead...

I was going to post links to PR type images but frankly since those MPAA goons would probably consider that stealing their IP even though I would be doing it to advertise their damn film I can't be bothered trying to figure out how to extract a decent picture of the film from the script silliness that is preventing me from directly embedding a link to their site from here. So instead here's the first five minutes courtesy of YouTube.

 

Seriously if you haven't read the books yet and are intending to go see the film then you may want to skip this until you have seen it.

.....

Anyway for those of you who have read the books or who really don't care about spoilers, read on.

......

I'm conflicted. I have to say that I absolutely love Pullmans's "His Dark Materials" trilogy and I have been very worried that this attempt to make a film of it would just get it all wrong and ruin them for me. I'm happy to say that that hasn't happened at all. In fact the development of "Lyra's World" is stunning, the design of it is incredible, the set designs are awesome, the costumes are exquisite and above all the utterly seamless effects used to create the Steampunk Victorian environment demonstrate a level of technical sophistication that is better than anything I've ever seen.

The casting is excellent and (most of) the acting is top notch. I don't think anyone is going to be handing out Oscars but Dakota Blue Richards is incredible and captures Lyra far better than I would ever have thought any child actor ever could, Nicole Kidman definitely finds Mrs Coulter's exceptionally disturbed soul and the remainder of the cast are exceptionally well chosen. Once or twice the supporting kids are a little wooden but the general level of this film is very high.

The animation of the Daemons is virtually perfect, particularly when it is not over done. At one or two points the animation wizards just had to start showboating but the interleaving of animation and live action only ever stumbles if you are very fussy, know what you are looking for and are looking very hard.

The storyline is reasonably loyally rendered and in particular the spirit of the book is more or less maintained, at least from my perspective with the memory loss of a three year gap since I read it. The main protagonists in the overarching story of the trilogy have been introduced and some have begun to show that they have depth.

The director also doesn't pull too much of the grit out of the story. It's not quite as brutal as the book but there's lots of dead bodies and mutilated bears before it ends and it more than deserves its Irish 12A rating. I fair jumped on more than one occassion but I am a bit of a wimp. Anyway I suspect that as the more adult themes (ie those related to sex) of the books get developed in the later films that may rise as film rating authorities see sex as a much more dangerous thing for children to be exposed to than child kidnapping, murder and mutilation.

But all is not perfect. For some reason the technical wizards who can make a convincingly realistic creature that morphs from being a pine marten into a small bird then into a cat and a seagull without missing a beat found it impossible to create a convincing flying witch. It may just be me being a bit fussy but I kept looking for the wires when they were taking off. I found the animation of Iorek Byrnison, the armoured bear, to be less convincing than the daemons but again that might just be me being picky.

I could easily forgive those minor problems but there is one huge problem. The person responsible for the final edit of the cut that I saw was a complete and utter idiot. I don't think the end result is that someone who hasn't read the books can't follow the story but there were four or five points when I was sitting scratching my head asking myself how a particular character knew what they did. I suspect that the director and writers were building a 150 minute film that the suits got hold of and decided had to be no longer than 115.

The DVD release of this will probably be awesome but the net effect of the hack editing job is that I am somewhat disappointed. Overall I'd give it a solid 7/10 with the potential to be an 8+ if they let the director do the DVD release properly.

OpenID and Blogger

So we've finally got a potentially useful OpenID implementation on Blogger - you can now choose to allow OpenID authentication for commenter identity handling.

Give it a whirl and let me know if it works.

Halting State.

I finally got around to giving some attention to Halting State, Charlie Stross's latest book where he builds out a near future plotline and avoids the singularity \ post-singularity themes of his earlier works. This near term SF focus has become a trend lately with Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End, Ken MacLeod's Execution Channel and William Gibson's Spook Country all demonstrating that the near future is pretty fertile terrain for good hard SF. Halting State's an especially intriguing book for me as it seems to have been written specifically for my demographic - socially challenged tech-geeks with a gaming habit and a short attention span - and it certainly pushes all the buttons in terms of my areas of tech interest: its basic premise is that viable attacks on cryptographic network security protocols could be a potential battleground for the next cold war, for crying out loud that sounds like me having a rant in the pub. Anyway the basic story line is great and would also have been entirely novel (a bank in an online MMO falls victim to an in game heist and this leads to massive oddness as the distinction between reality and the gaming\virtual worlds gets very messy..) had it not been for the fact that a "real" banking fraud on a virtual bank within an MMO game made headlines earlier this year just as Stross was proofing the book for release. The lack of true originality doesn't matter a bit though and the risk that the future may turn out just as weird as you predicted must be one that all SF writers hope they will have to deal with some day.

Like Vinge's Rainbows End and MacLeod's "Execution Channel" Stross makes a compelling SF storyline without having to rely on any genuinely magical technology. Of all three books Rainbows End goes a bit further in terms of extrapolating where current technological trends might take us but none of these books require anyone to suspend their basic understanding of physics in the way that Iain M. Banks' Culture series or Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth sagas' do. This near future stuff is quite risky given the pace that technology moves at and even though I think Rainbows End is an ever so slightly better book, Vinge does not keep the tech as well controlled as Stross does. That may well mean that Halting State ages much more gracefully than Rainbows End, time will tell.

I still have the nagging feeling that it really is too much of a niche book despite being an excellent thriller I think Stross is really only writing for an audience of people like me this time and I would worry that it is going to put off most potential readers. He certainly pulls no punches in dumbing down the tech aspects of his plot and I wonder how many non tech nuts will be comfortable with acronyms like ARG\LARP\MMO and concepts like haptic feedback and quantum cryptography being important parts of the storyline. However, now that the Wii and the Nintendo DS are demolishing the perceived boundaries of the gaming market in general and connected network gaming with haptic feedback in particular, there are some signs that the "gamer geek" niche may thankfully become a subset of all Gamers rather than the dominant form. I don't think we're there yet though and I am still a bit reluctant to recommend the book to anyone who hasn't spent a good 10 years playing with tech under their belts and, to borrow Stross's own description of himself, hasn't got a low saving throw vs "Shiny" (and doesn't know what that means).

For those of you who are sad middle aged tech geeks though this is a fantastic near future SF(ish) yarn that deserved to be a strong candidate for this years Hugo's.

Standards Redux

Now I'm confused, much happier and still annoyed. I logged back into Vista 32 on the Dell M1330 and it connected to the D-Link router quite happily. I'm certain I tested this combination of settings yesterday with no joy but perhaps there was some sort of patch stuck in the pipeline. Clearly I forgot Rule #1 (Give it a good kick, turn everything off and restart before trying to do anything).

Performance was pretty poor though - Ixia's QCheck gaves me results in the 600kbps -> 1.5Mbps range between the Desktop (connected over 802.11n) and the laptop (connected over 802.11g) which is extremely poor even for 802.11g/n compatibility mode. Intel had much more recent drivers than those supplied with the machine or up on Windows Update so I downloaded and installed them and now I have transfer rates in the 5-7Mbps range which I suspect is as good as it gets when you are actively mixing standards concurrently on the same router.

It's still pathetic that we can still have so many problems with the basics of Wireless Networking. someone really should sort that 802.11 crew out once and for all.