Google’s voice search…

…is pure fucking hilarity.

So I signed up for a VOIP service so I can keep in touch with Mariah and the kids in the U.S.A., and to that end I picked up a microphone attachment for my iPod. Call quality via Fring has been excellent. Chatting hands-free has been excellenter. Being able to freely experiment with other voice-keyed iPod applications has been excellentest.

One of the fun old apps whose new features I’ve been playing with is Google’s voice search as part of it’s Mobile App. I kid you not, it’s heuristically-determined that I am a fucking Irish drunk.

1 day ago  /  0 notes  /  Comments

Netbook interfaces

I’ve always interpreted being a power user as being a person who know exactly and precisely what they want their computer to do for them, and having the means to extract just that. As a power user I want an abject lack of distractions and annoyances from my user interface coupled with the ability to quickly handle any one of several repetitive tasks. In my case I long-ago settled upon Openbox and supplemented it with a small clade of helper scripts.

With Openbox there isn’t either a GUI or any arbitrary limitations on reconfigurability to stop me curating the exact experience I want. Every application on its own virtual desktop. Zero transition effects. Complete keyboard control through rc.conf. Extensibility: Openbox ties excellently into Gnome, to the point that I load my Gnome settings at launch. When I typically want to go and binge on a fuller user experience for a day or two I’ll drop into Gnome - because as we all know, Gnome is one of those things that Ubuntu and Canonical have turned into a fantastic user-friendly offering. I gets me my eye-candy and I gets to click the buttons that makes the stuff happen.

At the same time I’m always been keeping a weather eye on those Linux projects that are hoping to offer a user experience optimized for the small Netbook form: Meego and Jolicloud, which are full operating systems; Canonical’s Unity and Gnome Shell are simple(r) modifications of the standard Gnome environment that you can install alongside. I have the latest builds of Gnome Shell and Canonical’s Unity - both of them modified Gnome environments running on my Ubuntu - installed. I have the latest releases of Meego and Jolicloud - both of them modified Gnome environments running on…wait.

My first, most disappointing discovery about Jolicloud and Meego came about two minutes in. I picked away at the virtual scabs and discovered that both distributions/user environments are apparently just modifications of Gnome. Jolicloud is even built right off of Ubuntu 9.04/Jaunty Jackalope, to the point that I can add the current Ubuntu apt-get repositories and patch up to 10.04. Ho hum.

My disappointment is shallow: Somehow I expected to peek behind the pretty facade and really find little magic faeries carrying packets to and fro from the Cloud. The fact that I find Linux and even Gnome shouldn’t be any kind of a shock.

My second shock was just how well Meego and Jolicloud hide all of the fun and useful applications. Instant messaging? Check. Web browser and web applications? Check. Email, calendar and task management applications? Check. Terminal, advanced text editor, file system access and niceties like VOIP clients? Good luck. I can Alt+F1 for a terminal (and the win!) in Jolicloud, Shell and Unity. They are present, but hidden, which is a minor gripe. Even if I choose to use a Netbook-friendly interface I still want to have access to my full breadth of applications.

My third (and most minor) problem is that these interfaces are best run on specialized hardware; when you trust your information to the internet, you trust your laptop to always have an Internet connection. Wifi just doesn’t cut it.

I’ll continue this rant later. :)

2 days ago  /  0 notes  /  Comments

VOIP

4 days ago  /  0 notes  /  Comments

I’m sick

I’ve spent eighteen out of the last twenty-four hours unconscious and the back of my throat feels like a xenomorph has been drooling acid down there for most of it. Daddy needs teh Lemsip.

4 days ago  /  0 notes  /  Comments

02:23

I just had something of a deja vu experience: Calming down a child who has just woken up frightened from a nightmare. I - being a quasi-insomniac who just keeps odd hours - was awake anyways reading a book when I started to imagine I was hearing a voice. I ignored it.

“Why,” you ask, “would you ever ignore an imaginary voice?” Occam’s razor: It is imaginary.

The voice persisted I finally got up, wandered across the hall and peeked into Ella’s room to discover a two-year old niece who was very much awake and upset. Jen came in, we calmed her down, and put her back into my sister’s bed. And that was that. I just thought it was an event worth mentioning. Reminisences and bizzarely fond memories of doing just this with Caira.

Okay, Ella waking up was an utterly mundane moment, but I’m in a mood to write, I’m in a place amenable to writing and I’ll be dammed if I do anything but write.

So hi. It’s 02:37 and I’m still wide-awake. Listening to Metallica’s Black Album for good measure. Via a thoroughly geeky MPD/Sonata connection. Blogging to a Tomboy note saved into my Dropbox for later input into Tumblr when I am back online - that’s something I can talk about now. When you transfer the bulk of your key information to the Internet, when you manage your personal organization via Internet tools, when every important interaction with another human being takes place of the Internet, you really feel the sting of not having on-demand access. When I stay at Jen’s house in the wild barrens of Loughrea (I’m babysitting, tomorrow) I miss out on talking to friends online, sinking hours into pointless pursuits, toying with new and sly ways of breaking down the divisions between my online and offline existences. My Netbook becomes so much inert plastic, metal and glass. At 02:50 I’m listening to Alexi Murdoch’s Time Without Consequences and I wonder at how much my computing experience changed over the course of the past decade. In 1999 and 2000, my computer was the entire experience in and of itself. It was a big, noisy Compaq box running Windows 98 and packing a bad-boy 10 gigabyte hard disk and 128 megabytes of RAM. It…well it wasn’t cutting edge, wasn’t high-end. It was a consumer-class, family-friendly personal computer. But it certainly held its own. Internet access was strictly 56k dialup.

I will spare you my fucked-up horror stories of the phone bills I paid after I discovered my first (and most fateful) MMOG, Asheron’s Call, in early 2000.

Communication was slow, fragmentary and imperfect. I was a member of a Wheel of Time forum or three, I arranged card trades on the Star Trek: CCG Decipher forum and I used tools with an imperfect understanding. Very few of our modern Internet services were in place: No Twitter, no Facebook, no Bittorrent. Webmail was a bit of a joke. I began with Hotmail (fenster_@hotmail.com), and moved on to Yahoo! (bhalash0@yahoo.com) for no good reason that I can name today. Gmail was still four years away. I had a whopping 1mb of online storage and fuck-all functionality beyond New, Delete, Reply, Mark as Spam. I installed my first Linux distro - Suse from the DVD grifted off a magainze cover, because I simply did not have the bandwidth to download a whole multi-gigabyte ISO. I still vividly recall getting a 1mb Eircom DSL line installed and being able to download a new distro overnight. I also recall getting booted as a customer from an “unlimited” 56k dialup service because I treated it exactly as such. It was maybe an early incarnation of Digiweb?

2010? It’s 03:09 and I’m still listening to Alexi Murdoch. I’m trying to tote up just how much online disk space I have access to as maybe the best way to describe just how my Internet experience has changed… but I’m finding it hard to pin down a definite number. Basics:

• Dropbox: Currently 4.5 gigabyes and counting. About 3GB are still free. I have a second Dropbox account I share with 091 Labs. 2.2GB.
• Gmail (bhalash@gmail.com): 2GB out of 7.5GB are in use.
• Digiweb (main account). I have a 15GB allocation on my main account. When I last looked mid-week, I still had 12GB left free, even when I sub-let this to two other people, one is my wife and the other is a Galway photographer. I occasionally mount this via SSHFS as a remote, secure swap space. I have a second account, originally purchased for my wife but never used. 10Gb. Set to expire next April.
• Google Apps. I have a single 7.5GB mail account currently in use (mark@bhalash.com), although if I wanted to abuse Google’s excellent and free service I could make up another 49 accounts with the same storage and mount them with GmailFS. Potentially ~350 GB.
• Wuala. I’m really still learning the quirks and nuances of this service, but I was gifted with a 15GB yearly subscription for sharing my space hard disk space. This space is dynamically expandable by creating an encrypted volume to share with other users - so I could hypothetically plug in my 1 terabyte external storage disk and correspondingly reap the rewards.
• Other online storage providers too?

So I could have at least one point three five terabytes on-demand of Internet storage space if I set up a desktop and rigged it correctly. That’s one thousand, three hundred and fifty gigabytes of storage. More realistically I have a little shy of thirty gigabytes, with the crimp still being my available bandwidth, unfortunately. Even with 091 Labs’ excellent pipe and my own fantastic home Internet speeds, I’m still averaging a maximum of 1MB/s up.

Come 2020, in (good old) Ireland I expect to have 10MB/s up and at least one hundred gigabytes of free online storage, before any additions or purchases.

The next question: Is all of this a sign of a comining technological singularity? Someone like Ray Kurzweil would answer with an empathic “Yes!”, but I don’t equate technologic evolution to the technologic revolution we need before we as a race possess self-improving machine intelligences and seamless synergy between flesh and metal, coupled with an economy that makes us all filthy rich by early 21st century standards. Never mind the moral, theologic, political and economic changes that has to accompany it. Fuck. Any singularity is far off when I share the world with dumb Christian rednecks who want to teach my children, in school, their nonsense about a god possessing a magic wand that magicked all life into existence as-is.

It’s 03:37 and I’m listening to Coldplay’s X&Y. Swap the zero for a one and the hour would be 1337 in every way which matters.

I think I’m going to save this draft for face-checking tomorrow at 091 Labs, pee and then lay down in a probably vain attempt to sleep.

5 days ago  /  0 notes  /  Comments

Fuck

It’s a bit of a running joke on Twitter that each time I say “fuck” my blog’s traffic has a small spike. Beyond that, ignoring the vulgarity, fuck is a surprisingly expressive word. You can load it down with any kind of nuance and reflection and then interject it into almost any kind of conversation:

“How are you today?”
“…fuck.”
“Oh.”

So yeah? My day? Fuck. Up until 5am yesterday morning. Slept until 9am this morning. Job interview and work trial from 11-12 (went great). Handed out resumes around town after that. Came home, tormented Ella and was in bed and asleep by 5pm. Slept until about 11. Showered and came down to 091 Labs by about midnight. Played some World of Warcraft, worked on seven panoramas and began uploading them to Dropbox for work at home. Currently stitching another three.

I’m really topsy-turvy right now, with my Circadian rhythms turned all back and around. I’m sleeping from late night (early morning?) through to mid-afternoon, or sleeping until mid-morning and then crashing and crashing hard in the middle of the evening. It’s really an unhappy situation because I’m always tired and prone to just nodding off at eldritch hours. If this is the worst I have to suffer for being on the mend from depression, so be it, but I won’t admit to any enjoyment of it.

In other news, Garrett turns one in just under three weeks. My son’s first birthday, which I will miss.

/bittersweet

I have absolutely no regrets about leaving Mariah. None. My conscience is clear on this: I was so utterly miserable in the situation of living with her family, and our fights were becoming so regular and embittered and violent that I know if I had stayed one or the other of us would be dead now. What I regret is leaving the children. When I talk to Caira on the phone or webcam, the raw strength of her love and hurt tears me in two. She loves me, she misses me and she simply doesn’t understand why I can’t home home. My first interaction with Garrett was from the other side of a planet, through a webcam. Having to miss those firsts (and fourths, with Caira) are what I bitterly regret each and every day.

1 week ago  /  0 notes  /  Comments

Skybreaker, Hammer

The Alliance’s Skybreaker and Horde’s Ogrim’s Hammer are two very iconic objects for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King players. Serving as flying, mobile bases for each size in Icecrown, the massive gunships come together to clash during the climatic assault on the Lich King’s Icecrown Citadel.

Speaking as the guy who decided to panoramize these two gunships? They were a bitch. Just like landing on a boat, once you land on a gunship you “move” with it. The space where you move with the gunship extends a ways past the hull, leaving a flyer in a very precarious position if they want to capture the entire gunship. I braved (yes) a ganking and simply accidentally dismounting to capture these. Unfortunately, in order to make the background seamlessly fit I had to turn my view distance down to almost zero.

1 week ago  /  0 notes  /  Comments