Asus EEE and the Fabric of the Universe

I should have spent this evening working out how to install FreeMind on the Asus EEE PC. However despite my miniature box of Linux goodness having been dispatched for overnight shipping last Thursday, five days later it has yet to arrive. According to the delivery company's tracking system it reached Gatwick on Friday morning and promptly disappeared.

Now, according to Seth LLoyd the Universe can be considered to be a quantum computer. We know that a suitably dense concentration of matter can warp the fabric of the Universe - time and space. It therefore does not seem unreasonable that a suitably dense concentration of computing power will have the same effect, when the Cosmos is considered as a quantum computer.

The small size of the Asus EEE PC means that a lot of computer power is concentrated into a small amount of space. Placing too many EEE's together will produce a too dense computing potential leading to dire consequences for the fabric of the Universe. It is well known that Asus export the EEE in boxes of only five. This is not due to a world-wide shortage and Asus not being able to keep up with demand, but because this is the largest number that can be safely placed in close proximity.

In the case of my EEE, it would appear that the carrier stacked it with too many other EEE's in the same shipment. The resulting computational singularity led to a hole in the fabric of the Universe as the EEE's collapsed into their own NAND gates.

Asus EEE PC 4G Black and Linuxy

I've finally given into the lust and ordered an Asus EEE PC 4G. Still missing the old Psion Series 5, never being able to afford the Series 7 and having briefly being excited by the Palm Foleo it was only a matter of time before I gave into the EEE's Linuxy charms.

So I now have ten days to buy an SDHC or two, find a case and decide what I'm going to install on it. This one is going to remain with Xandros and will probably spend most of its time running VIM. My only concern is that it doesn't use a firewall by default. All my Unix experience has been with corporate Web servers so promiscuous WiFi and Linux without a firewall is all new to me. I'm happy that at home with a router will be safe enough, but out on the streets...

By the way TweakTown has an interesting disassembly of the beast.

Obsolete Technology

It was 1975 and a spotty 15-year old boy was intently studying a photograph in a glossy magazine. Late at night and under the bed clothes with a torch, I couldn't sleep for thinking about running my hands over that curvaceous teletype, flipping those toggle switches and thrilling to the little red lights flickering on and off...



The magazine in question was Scientific American and the object of my lust was the IMSAI 8080. I never did get my hands on one - though I did my fair share of toggling bootstrap loaders into similar machines (mainly a PDP-8 with core memory and rather worn out front-panel switches.)

The Obsolete Technology site provides a fascinating journey through the first 18 years of personal computing. With lots of photos, information, specifications and old adverts that bring the memories come flooding back. I was amazed to find that I had owned or extensively used thirteen of the featured machines… and spent hours daydreaming about a lot more besides.

Traps, Pitfalls and Corner Cases

That Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter have a lot to answer for! They have caused me much embarrassment and inconvenience this evening. After a long day's interviewing Java developers I thought I'd wind down on the train by reading a few sections of the aforementioned Bloch and Gafter's "Java Puzzlers".

This book is an absolute joy. At the bottom of each right hand page is a short piece of Java code and a simple question. For example the first puzzle is a one line method, and the question "Does the method work?" Of course the answer is no... but why? After each puzzle the next page gives a detailed explanation, which is always informative, lively, entertaining and often surprising.

Even if you think you know the JLS well you might be surprised by how often Bloch and Gafter manage to fool you. On the train I looked at one line of code for about ten minutes. I knew that there was a trick there, but just couldn't see it. When I turned the page and saw how completely I'd be fooled I burst into laughter. My fellow passengers gave me some very strange looks; not all of them entirely friendly. Apparently it is not the done thing to laugh at computer text books on the tube.

And the inconvenience? Well I was so engrossed in one problem that I missed my station - the first time in decades of commuting. Oh, those crazy Google engineers!

Slide Rule Universe

Slide Rule Universe has everything you every wanted to know about slide rules, even how to build your own… You did want to know about slide rules, didn’t you?

An amazing variety of slide rules are on sale in the catalog - fancy calculating the trajectory of a 105mm Howitzer shell, or computing flow parameters for hydraulic valves, then they have a slide rule for you.

Personally I’m still looking for a good set of Napier’s Bones - never seem to turn up on eBay for some reason.

Binary Adder Made of Wood and Marbles

Here’s a wooden binary adder that uses marbles for the bits. Be sure to watch the video demonstration - you only realise how clever the design is when you see it in action, especially as the carry bits cascade through the digits.

There’s plenty more to see on the rest of the site, including Marble Machine 2, an ingenious piece of kinetic art, and photography using a flatbed scanner.

War of the Worlds

Darkhorse.com have a wonderful comic version of "The War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells. They appear to have kept very close to the original text and I love their rendering of the Martians. Great stuff!

The comic does appear to have been slightly influenced by that Jeff Wayne chappy though - I'm sure that in the original the tripods called out "Ulla", rather than the more musical "Ooolaaa!"

Projekt Categories

Categories or tags are one of the most useful ways of managing actions using an outliner. They allow a kind of cross-cut view orthogonal to the normal tree-like structure of the action list. For example I keep all my plans and actions in an outline that has Covey-like 'roles' as the top-level branches. These are my main areas of responsibility - father, husband, son, friend, developer, student etc. Under each of these roles I have a list of projects, and under each project there are list of nodes contain plans, notes and actions.

That's fine for planning purposes, but when I'm about to visit a particular client, friend or perhaps just a shopping mall, I want to cut across that tree structure and just see a list of the next actions I need to do in that context. By tagging actions with the context in which they need to be carried out it's then easy to display only the actions needed in a particular context, even when they are for different projects.

On the Palm, using Shadow Plan and the built in Tasks application it was easy to tag each action with a category such as @laptop, @shops, or @desk. But Projekt on the Nokia E61 is not quite so slick. I was disappointing to find that, although it supports 26 categories (an improvement over the Palm) they can only be named 'A' to 'Z'.

Although it is not that difficult to remember that category 'D' is for next actions that need to be done at my desk, and 'L' need to be done on the laptop, I don't understand why Projekt doesn't support more flexibly named categories. Even if using a single character field is a limitation of the underlying database it should be easy to add a mapping between more meaningful names and those single characters. It seems such an unfriendly limitation.

Even more annoying is that it doesn't support blank or space as a category - every entry has to have at least a default of 'A' or 'Z' as the category. Not a problem when filtering, but if the category column is enabled in the list view it is hard to see the meaningful category symbols between all those 'A's.

On the other hand I love Projekt's filter. It allows entries for multiple categories to be selected for display. So it is easy to display all next actions for say, a 'laptop' context and an 'anywhere' context, but hide all others.

K'NEX Computer

Lego, relays, wood and marbles… it was only a matter of time before somebody came up with a K’NEX computer. This 4-bit computer, ten feet tall and built of K’NEX, works in a similar way to other ball-based computers. Check out the links on the right of the page for some useful explanations.

E61 Projekt Revisited

My initial excitement on buying a Nokia E61 soon after it first appeared in the UK was quickly dampened on first contact with its built-in PIM software. Here was the spiritual successor to the Psion Series 5 with a To-do manager that was barely usable. I was bitterly disappointed.

I had been hoping to move my GTD management from Shadow Plan on a Palm to the E61 in the expectation that the built-in keyboard would be much quicker than Palm Graffiti. I looked at a wide range of third party Symbian PIM applications over the following weeks, and Kylom's Projekt came closest to my needs. However I found its user interface to lack consistency and to be somewhat fiddly to use. It just didn't feel 'right'.

So ever since the E61 has languished as a (very good) mobile e-mail and Web terminal and I've continued to carry around the old Palm Tungsten.

Well, the Palm's digitiser is beginning to show signs of age, so it is time to take another look at Projekt. Initial impressions of version 1.10 are very encouraging. The user interface has a tight, slick feel and seems to require fewer keystrokes than before for the main functions. I was quickly able to create a small tree of information and to-do nodes without recourse to the manual.

Over the next few days I'm going to transfer my Shadow Plan data to Projekt and give it some serious exercise - though I already suspect that I'll be parting with €24.95 in the near future.

Starship Dimensions

Starship Dimensions is a beautiful site that contains hundreds of scale drawings of Science-Fiction space craft - from Serenity to the Dyson Sphere. I hate to recommend using IE, but hitting the site with that browser allows you to pick up the ships and drag them around, making it easy to compare the relative sizes of Moya and Station V from 2001, for example.

A great site to just browse and marvel at the drawings, but also a priceless resource to help win those alcohol-fueled arguments over whether Godzilla would fit inside a Cardassian Keldon starship.