A workstation to die for

I used to run two monitors on my desk before we invested in a 24" LCD.  Just when I thought I was done with monitor envy, this comes along:

This is six Dell 30" LCD displays, all connected to the same computer, running at 7680x3200.  Go check out the article over on Hack A Day.

Google buys ReCAPTCHA

 Google has purchased ReCAPTCHA Inc., the CMU spinoff that is behind those distorted images used in Web site security. Story here from the CMU site.

New York Times gets hit

 An interesting article about how the New York Times Web site got invaded by malware.

Drivers are necessary but pesky

TechMan column:

Blackberry Tour review

A while back, the good folks at Verizon sent us an HTC Ozone and a Blackberry Tour to play with.  Ced and I split these up and I drew Tour duty (get it?).

Note on my Blackberry cred:  I've been using RIM's devices since the 8703, which was your basic Blackberry form factor with a physical QWERTY keyboard.  We also use the Blackberry Enterprise Server here, which makes the device an extension of our corporate Exchange server.  'nuff said?  Moving on.

My current Blackberry is the Storm, which was RIM's first touchscreen device.  Initially I was rather fond of the concept but its implementation wore me out after a time.  The keys are hard for my fat thumbs to press, especially the ones around the edges of the keyboard.  It's darned near impossible for me to reliable hit the "P" key, making it extremely hard to type things like "post-gazette.com".  Other things like battery life and the portrait-landscape orientation switching weren't very good either.  In short, the only thing I really like about the Storm is the camera.

The Tour is the same physical size and shape as the Storm but comes with a physical keyboard on the bottom like past Blackberries.  It also comes with the trackball in the center which acts just like you would expect.  In most cases it just moves the focus highlight around the screen so that you can push in on it to activate something, but at other times (like in the web browser) you will get a mouse cursor.  This made navigation through the OS and applications a cinch.

I've always been fond of RIM's full QWERTY keyboards.  This one is excellent as well, and with it my typing is quicker and a lot more accurate.  No issues to report there.

The screen resolution on the Tour is amazing.  I wasn't sure how much smaller the pixels could get but this thing is like looking at my desktop monitor.  

A word about the speed.  After enduring the second-and-a-half long pauses between some applications on my Storm, this thing is a rocket.  The speed at which it moves from app to home screen is pretty remarkable.  I'm guessing the OS or the processor or both were tweaked.

One new feature in the OS that users will like is that you can receive your emails in the same format it was created in.  This preserves all the formatting if the email was in HTML originally, which helps to ensure things don't get lost in translation.  So now when my boss puts something in bold because she's mad at me, I'm not missing her point.

The rest of the device is what you would expect from RIM.  It's got a camera that is every bit as good as the Storm's and battery life that seems a bit better considering that it doesn't have that gigantic screen to drive anymore.  In short, this is my favorite Blackberry to date and it's just a shame that I have to send it back.

An apology for Alan Turing

Alan Turing, the British mathematician and Bletchley Park codebreaker, has received a formal apology from the British government for treatment he received in the 1950s after admitting a homosexual relationship.  

Considered by many to be the father of modern computer science, Turing was instrumental in breaking codes used by the Nazis during World War II.  While working in the section responsible for deciphering German naval transmissions, he devised a machine that could determine the rotor settings for the Enigma encoding machine.  This gave the allies an enormous advantage and is widely believed to have shortened the war dramatically.

His post-war work included many designs for computing equipment that could run more than one program without significant physical changes in between.  Known as a "stored-program computer", it revolutionized the concept of data processing, and the computer you are using to read this blog post today is the great, great, great, great, great grandchild of those machines.

In 1952, Turing was convicted of a charge of gross indecency for being an admitted homosexual.  Upon sentencing, he was given a choice between imprisonment or probation, the latter on condition that he agree to hormonal treatments to reduce his libido.  Known as "chemical castration", the process required that he receive estrogen injections over the course of a year. 

Two years later, his cleaner found him dead of an apparent suicide by poisoning.

This past August, a petition circulated on Turing's behalf by British computer programmer John Graham-Cumming gathered more than 30,000 signatures and led to the government's response today by Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Brown described Turing's treatment as "horrifying" and "utterly unfair", and said that the country owed Turing a huge debt for his work.  An understatement, to be sure.

Brown's speech ended thusly:

It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present. So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work, I am very proud to say: we're sorry. You deserved so much better.

You can read the full text of Brown's remarks here.

Pigeon provides faster data transfer than South African internet

Next time you have a complaint about your internet service, consider this:

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - A South African company on Wednesday proved it was faster to transmit data by carrier pigeon than to send it using the country's leading internet service provider.

Local news agency SAPA reported the 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 50 miles from Unlimited IT's offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card strapped to its leg.

Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds — the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using a line provided by Telkom.

Can you imagine sending internet packets this way?  Imagine the coating of bird droppings on your car if real TCP/IP packets were sent by pigeon.  That would be a new spin on the old "Denial of Service attack".

iPod Touch owners get the short stick

There was little in today's Apple announcement for iPod Touch owners like TechMan. No camera, no video. There was another upgrade of the software, 3.1. At least Touch owners apparently won't have to pay for it as in the past. And even though Apple lowered the price of the Touch, with no changes, there is no reason to buy a new one.

Live updates of Apple announcement

 A link to live updates of Apple announcement going on now.

Rumblings about Snow Leopard

There have been increasing rumblings in the tech press about problems with Apple's Snow Leopard upgrade. TechMan recently upgraded to Snow Leopard and did have some problems.

First off all, the upgrade wouldn't complete. It kept stalling in the middle. I ended up having to reinstall Leopard to get the upgrade to work. Then I could not connect to my WiFi network. A call to Apple revealed that Snow Leopard doesn't like the old WEP security still on some routers and would be happier with WPA. But the Apple tech got it to work. Next problem was that my Epson printer would not reinstall. That one is still unsolved although my Bamboo tablet installed fine. Here's a link to an article about other Snow Leopard problems.