Must have been the free WiFi

Pittsburgh to host the G20 summit in September? Wow. Must have been the free Downtown WiFi that lured them. 

Kindle e-reader experiment ends

The Kindle 2 I purchased in late April is on its way back to Amazon.  There's nothing wrong with it.  Well, maybe there is.  Or maybe there's something wrong with me.  Who can say?

My motivation for purchasing an e-book reader was simple enough.  I wanted to be able to have my programming reference manuals and textbooks on hand everywhere I went.  Each of those books runs between 600 and 1,000 pages, so you can imagine what just one of them weighs.  Now throw ten of them in a backpack and take a walk.  Ouch.

This plan fell apart for a couple of reasons:

• The manuals I use daily are from publishers that haven't jumped on the Kindle bandwagon, so their books aren't in the format that works best on the device.  They do have MOBI and PDF versions and I purchased a few.  Neither format worked flawlessly on the Kindle (MOBIs were difficult to search through and you have to convert PDFs through Amazon before they will work, and even then they're a mess).
  
• I spend the majority of my book time with one finger in the index.  When the index lists several pages for the topic I'm looking for, it's very easy to refer back to the index entry with that finger between the pages.  Try as I might, I couldn't find a way to do this with the Kindle.  Maybe my finger isn't small enough.
• A week after my Kindle arrived, Amazon announce the Kindle DX, with a larger screen, more memory and native PDF support.  It was made for exactly the type of e-reading I had planned to do.  If I can get my hands on one to try it out, I may consider the upgrade.

Those of you who aren't as geeky as myself might enjoy the Kindle 2 more than I did.  I did read some novels on it and that experience was very enjoyable, but that style of reading doesn't involve the back-and-forth motion that reference books require. 

So I'm headed back to the drawing board.

The coolest business card ever made

I'm a big fan of DIY and the whole "Maker" movement that has been picking up speed recently.  One of the godmothers of the movement is Limor Fried, who runs the excellent parts and project web site called Adafruit Industries, and she has whipped up what is probably the coolest business card ever designed.

Remember the old Spirograph toy?  Loved that thing as a kid.  This business card disassembles into one and can destroy a whole day's productivity at the office.  I'd love to get my hands on one.

You're sitting on my shift

A chair made out of recycled computer keyboards -- it look comfortable.

Palm Pre out June 6

Sprint and Palm have announced the debut of the Palm Pre smartphone on June 6.

Wolfram Alpha debuts

Since the following column was published on a Friday morning deadline, I can add some more recent information.

Wolfram Alpha is indeed up and running at www.wolframalpha.com. On Saturday the site was busied out a few times and when you could get in, response time was very slow. But as of last night and this morning, response is much better.

As soon as you begin using the site, two things become very clear (as mentioned in the column below.) One is that the search is very fact-oriented. And beyond that, how you phrase your query can be a little tricky. Look at the examples for some pointers on how to enter queries. The more specific information you are looking for, the better.

It is also evident that there are holes in the database that WolframAlpha searches. For example, it knew the county of my birth, but not the town of my birth which is the county seat. However, the Wolfram Alpha team has said the searchable database is a work in progress, so some of these holes should be filled in in the future.

For now it is an interesting experiment, perhaps with more potential than utility at the moment.

Here's the PG TechMan column:

There's been a lot of buzz about WolframAlpha, a new search engine that's not really a search engine. It's been touted in some circles as the next big thing in search.

The brainchild of British computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, the WolframAlpha has the daunting title of "computational knowledge engine."

WolframAlpha takes a specific question, searches its knowledge base for the information required and then uses computation to arrive at an answer. It then displays the answer in an organized way, including grids of facts and graphs.

To do this, WolframAlpha must understand your question, have a vast reserve of facts, which its developers have been entering into a database and know how to display the answer in meaningful form. All that is no small feat.

WolframAlpha is sort of a cross between Google and Wikipedia with differences from both. Like Google, it searches for an answer to a query, and like Wikipedia, it searches through a database of information that has been entered.

Unlike Google, it does not search the Web. Unlike Wikipedia, the facts have been compiled by experts, not volunteers, and the answer does not return in the form of an article. And unlike either, it applies computation to the facts it finds.

Here's an example Mr. Wolfram gives on the blog (blog.wolframalpha.com). Suppose you asked how far the moon is from the earth. Google and Wikipedia would return the traditional answer as part of a Web page or an article.

WolframAlpha, however, would know that the moon's path around the earth is elliptical, so the distance between the two is constantly changing. It might give you the textbook distance, but then do a computation and tell you how far away the moon is right then. Those two answers could be 10,000 miles different.

If you want to get good examples of queries on WolframAlpha, there is a screencast on the blog.

One example -- entering "2 cups OJ" will return nutritional information like you would see on the side of the carton, a breakdown of the vitamins and a nutritional comparison to other foods, among other data.

But there are uncertainties about WolframAlpha. We don't know the size of its knowledge store. The team behind it says it is a work in progress so its database will grow. But some early indications are that there are obvious holes in its store of data.

We do know that WolframAlpha was scheduled to launch late last week with an official date to go public tomorrow at www.wolframalpha.com. We also know that it is free.

The team planned to Webcast the process of taking the site live on the blog. Webcasting began Friday night and was to continue all weekend.

Mr. Wolfram goes into this endeavor with a reputation. He is well known for developing Mathematica in the 1980s, probably still the most widely used scientific computation program. Mathematica is the basis of the WolframAlpha computation engine. And he is the author of the controversial 2002 book "A New Kind of Science."

WolframAlpha does best with fact-based questions that have specific answers. No "What is the meaning of life?" kind of questions.

Mr. Wolfram says there are five computing centers housing two supercomputers and an impressive array of other equipment. That will provide the ability to handle 175 million queries per day. But you still may experience an overwhelmed site the first few days.

So you might want to try out WolframAlpha. It may already be available today at www.wolframalpha.com, for sure tomorrow. You be the judge of whether it is the next big thing.

HP recalls 70,000+ laptop batteries

The battery recalls of the last few years spared HP the embarrassment but it could only last so long.  They announced a recall of 70,000 or so batteries that were shipped in laptops between August 2007 and January 2008.  Click here to see if yours is one of them.

Affected models include:

Trouble with Google?

 Lots of reports on Twitter about people having trouble getting on Google and its various services. TechMan can get on from work but TechMaam can't from home.

Publish your blog to the Kindle and make pennies

Amazon has introduced a plan to allow all blog owners to add their blog to the Kindle e-book store.  Certain large blogs have been available in their store for a while now, with monthly subscription fees ranging from $1 to $2 (for big-name blogs with lots of readership).  With the new system, a blog owner can create an account to sell their blog in the store as well, but with a catch.

The catch is this: Amazon gets to keep 70% of the subscription fee.  You get the rest, which will be anywhere from $0.30 to $0.60 (if you're not a nobody like me) per user per month.  Amazon says they will set the prices to a "fair value", whatever that means.

So let me get this straight.  I write something (well, to be honest, most bloggers aren't actually writing, myself included) which might take quite a bit of my time, submit it to Amazon so that some small number of device users can read them, and you're only giving me 30%?

I guess that's why this is called "my two cents' worth".

Cheap computing getting cheaper all the time

I marvel all the time at how computer technology gets faster and cheaper, and the rate at which it happens.  The HP notebook I bought two and a half years ago for $1,500 is now less powerful than their $499 offering.  And since notebooks are now outselling desktop PCs worldwide, the power of portable computing will contine to climb while price plummets.  For example, the netbook craze has unleashed a whole host of modestly powerful portable computers that can be had for a song (sub $300).

This got me thinking about the evolution of the home computer and how we ended up where we are, and I thought I'd share my own travels through that time period.

My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000, introduced in 1982 as "the first computer under $100".  The output was only black and white and it didn't even have lower case letter capability.  With only 2K of RAM (that's less than 2% of the RAM that's in my netbook), you had to be efficient with your code, which wasn't as difficult as it sounds.  It only supported single-letter variable names so at best, you could declare 26 variables in memory at any one time unless you used an array.

Saving your programs on the Timex/Sinclair was tricky.  You hooked up a standard cassette tape recorder with two audio patch cables and the computer "sang" the data to the tape at the speed of 300 bps (about 1.5% the speed of my Comcast cable internet hookup).  Your program would take about ten minutes to save to the tape and you had no way of knowing whether it actually worked until you tried to load it agan.  I was constantly buying the best quality metal tapes and cleaning and demagnetizing the tape heads in the recorder.  In the end, I'd say three out of five programs would successfully load again after writing them to tape.  The rest were lost to the void.

I spent hours (days even) in front of that computer.  I wore out enough TVs that my father was kept busy repairing them to support my habit.  The gamma rays from the picture tubes probably did stunt my growth (right again, Dad).

Eventually I upgraded to a later model Timex/Sinclair, the TS 2068.  I thought I was in heaven!  Full color capability, a sound chip, mechanical keys (the 1000 had a flat membrane keyboard like a microwave oven) and 48K of RAM.  It even had a cartridge port so that you could buy add-on games and productivity software, and you could plug in two joysticks.  I wrote quite a few games for that machine and it was a lot of fun.  At least until you tried to save your program to the cassette.  I probably could have been John Carmack if it wasn't for those infernal tape drives.

And I had my brushes with the Atari 400 and 800 and Commodore VIC-20 and 64 computers.  I spent hours at friends' houses where I could get my hands on these.  The Commodore 64 had an early floppy disk drive that seemed to be a lot more reliable than my cassette tapes, but the drives were extremely noisy.  You could have entered them in a car stereo noise competition and placed.

And then the 8086 chip arrived on the scene, and the rest is a blur.  The world arrived at a standard for computing (more or less anyway), and offerings from companies like Timex/Sinclair, Atari and Commodore all slowly died off.  Now you find them on ebay or at junk sales for pennies.  Sad, really.

As Intel set out to prove Moore's Law correct, we saw the 80286, 386 and 486-based processors roll onto the scene.  Each one seemed like a quantum leap in performance.  I remember a 12MHz 286 machine I built once.  I even installed Windows 3.0 on the thing and marvelled at how cool it was that I could do two things at once, something that just wasn't possible in good old MS-DOS.  That computer cost me nearly $1,000 by the time I got rid of it.

And then the Pentium chips arrived.  After some trouble with floating-point math in the early models, they took off like a shot.  Processing speeds started at 60MHz and by the time the Pentium line came to an end in 2007, they were topping out at nearly 3Ghz.  Amazing.

The cycle continues.  The newest chips coming off the assembly lines are quad core models, containing four individual brains on one cheap, each capable of running the whole show by itself.  And the folks in Intel's skunk works labs are working on some monstrous 32-core chips.  I'm betting one of those chips will become self-aware and start building Terminator robots not long after it goes online.

If you have fond memories of computers that you've enjoyed using, you're as big a geek as I am please feel free to share them here.  And if you have any decent quality cassette tapes, let me know.  I have a few years worth of Post-Gazette web site data I'd like to back up.