Neuromancer

I just finished reading Neuromancer by William Gibson.
I hadn't read this for years and yes, it's still awesome. It's hard to believe it was written in 1984. The descriptions of the Matrix, the shared virtual space, with the bright lights of the mega corporations and AIs with their defensive firewalls and ice still feel futuristic and possible. There's a whole range of really cool tech on display, like nerve splicing, physical appearance and performance upgrades, derm patches for drug delivery, obviously the Matrix and AI, an uploaded mind, a rotating space habitat and being able to ride on the back of anothers sensory input via the Matrix.
It's not just all the really cool tech either, the language used is mind blowing in many parts. I love the descriptions of the recreational drugs kicking in for the protagonist, Case, and also the virtual runs against the defensive ice of an AI, where his mouth was "filled with an aching taste of blue" for example.
You really should read this if you haven't already.

Immortality

I just finished reading Immortality.
I really enjoyed this, particularly the concept, which I thought was brilliant. Seemingly randomly, hundreds of people in a single location all within a tight radius just die within a minute or so. It starts happening again and again, in larger and larger scale, and there is a race to discover just what is causing it and how to fix it. There is clearly a bacterium involved, but it just doesn't make sense.
The pacing is quite good given the novel is around 500 pages and the information about what is really happening is fed constantly so there are few boring patches. I liked the way a chapter would be devoted showing the lives of some characters only to have them die in a kill zone shortly afterwards. It was a little USA focused but hey, you get that.
Excellent.
99c.

Why is Optus so Awful?

Why is Optus so awful. I'm probably unfairly picking out Optus in this rant, when it really applies to all telecommunication providers generally. They are all horrible.
In particular, here are the things I have found horrible about Optus as a mobile comms provider:

• The coverage and availability of 3G data is pretty horrible. This might be slightly better with Telstra. Yes, I'm aware it is a difficult problem to solve and needs to be balanced with having 3G towers everywhere, but I never realised the situation was this bad.
• Pricing. Seriously? They charge at least ten times more than is reasonable for calls and data, and then give you ten times as much credit for any given plan. Really? Obviously this is so they can charge massive amounts when you go over your quota. It's just ridiculous.
• Website. The Website is horrible. To check your current mobile usage is slow, convoluted, and when you get there plain confusing and inadequate. See previous point about making vast amounts of money off people blowing their limit.
• I had bad experience actually getting a phone in the local Optus store. The expected guilt trip over not buying insurance was amusing. The selling of phone covers boring. The pushing of premium SMS and voice mail etc tedious. And after saying 'no' to everything, I was still charged for some premium SMS thing on my first bill. Oh, and then it took them three days to get my number switched from my old phone when it was supposed to take a maximum of four hours. FFS people.

You may be inclined to feel a little sorry for them though. They are pushing a seriously aging business model against the flow of technology. It won't be long before all we need from these people is a pure data connection, and the phone and software does the rest. Already we see Apple killing SMS with iMessage, and obviously there are a bunch of VOIP providers. All we need now is for them to fix mobile data access on their networks so all these things work all the time. Maybe that is why they aren't overly concerned about 3G not working half the time. It keeps them in the business of selling telephone calls and SMS. They've already lost the fixed line home phone business.

iPhone 4S

I finally gave up my aging Nokia E61i and got myself an Apple iPhone 4S.
Loving it. Siri is fun, but not awesome, although I have used it a couple of times to send a text (or iMessage) while walking, which is really useful.
The benefits of a 4S are all well known so I don't need to go into much detail, suffice to say that as my first phone device to do 3G data properly without worrying about cost too much, it's awesome. I never really used the Nokia 3G data as the cost didn't justify the value, but with the iPhone, it certainly does now.

Out of the Black

I recently read Out of the Black.
I haven't posted for a while, but I thought this was worth noting as I really enjoyed it. It was a little bit different, mixing in demon magic, zombie hords, mysticism, ninja pirates and nanotech. Good pacing, great concepts, lots of fun.

Firefox pausing, freezing

I've been annoyed for a while now about Firefox constantly freezing up for a couple of seconds at a time. And today I've fixed it. To do the same, go into the options, and find the Plugins section, and disable Shockwave Flash. In fact, disable any Adobe product.
Flash is evil and should be banned.

Earth Trojan Asteroid

This Earth trojan asteroid has been recently discovered. Trojan objects typically orbit one of the stable Lagrange points, L4 and L5, and to a lesser degree L1, L2, L3. I posted a cool animation showing this for Jupiter previously. What's interesting about this find is that it seems this asteroid is in a weird oscillating orbit moving between L3 and L4. I've never heard of anything doing that before, but orbital mechanics gets very chaotic in actual space with lots of other planets and the moon around. The simple theory of the Lagrange points is all well and good, but this looks just weird.

The Jennifer Morgue

I just finished reading The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross.
This might not be Science Fiction, but it is firmly in the fantasy/horror/tech/comedy genre and what's not to love about that? This book is a lot of fun to read. I particularly enjoyed the main character's hacking attempts using his occult apps on his Palm Treo. The spyware eyeliner was pretty cool too.

Swarm

I just finished reading Swarm by B. V. Larson.

I recently read Larson's Mech, and was expecting a similar ride. Happily, I had exactly that. This is another well paced easy read with a lot of action and large scale destruction. I kept thinking how similar it felt to War of the Worlds in the early parts, as alien ships arrive and start plucking people out of their houses. It quickly turns out they are testing them and trying to get the best possible commanders as possible. For what though, I won't spoil here.
I like where this series is headed. Swarm finishes with a minor win for the protagonist, but the larger picture is quite a bit more than knee deep in shit for humanity.
Excellent.

The Parasite

I just finished The Parasite by Neal Asher.
This was quite meaty for a novella and I really enjoyed it. It is one of Asher's earlier works, and lacks a little bit in the editing compared with the Pan/Tor novels, but that's OK because if it wasn't self re-published on Amazon it wouldn't be available at all.
In particular it was a treat to read about some early Polity tech ideas before the Polity books were written, for example, chainglass, golems, and an obsession with nano tendrils taking over a human body.
There was plenty of Asher style gore, and a high body count, much enjoyed, good fun.

Golf

I played nine holes of golf with a bunch of mates today. Damn, shame I was just topping most of my shots. Ah, well. Still, really pleasant getting out in the sun with a great bunch of guys, followed by beers. Thanks to Rob, Dave, Olaf and Paul :_)

Surface Detail

Just finished reading Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks.
I love Banks' Culture novels, they're always a lot of fun to read and I wasn't disappointed this time. This one revolves around the existence of virtual afterlives of various species throughout the galaxy. Many intelligent species host massive simulations where individuals can be uploaded to, where they can live forever in an environment of their choosing, or until they get bored with it all and want to terminate, or be frozen for a period of time and so on. The novel focuses on the virtual hells though, rather than the wonderful but boring virtual heavens.
The descriptions of the environment and the events of the main virtual hell made me physically wince, and stop reading on several occasions. Wow. That's some nasty shit right there.
The story revolves around a battle between groups of species that are for and against the existence of virtual hells, of course with the Culture being against, but not getting directly involved for political reasons. As always, the Culture AIs are hilarious in their dealings with their people, and other species, but in particular, I loved the SC ship called "Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints". I was laughing out loud on the bus, its avatar was awesome. Another ship with an excellent name was the "Me, I'm Counting". Brilliant.
An excellent, well written and fast paced book.

Sony Media Player

My MediaGate media player just died, the video out started to play up, so I tossed it out, and bought a WD TV Live. However, that didn't seem to be capable of putting out video on component out to my Sony SD CRT telly. No idea why, and after a couple of support calls to verify I hadn't done anything stupid, I sent it back. Shame. It seemed like a decent unit at a good price.
So I went and bought a Sony SMPN100. Cost a bit more, but not that much, and it plugged straight in and worked straight away. Sony talks to Sony.
And it is friggin awesome. It plays all the media types I have shared from my Windows 7 PC, and streams direct from ABC iView, YouTube, and a bunch of other stuff.
Sweet.

[update 2 July 2012]
Except the damn thing only plays HD from a USB stick. Useless. Now that I've upgraded all my systems to HD, this has to go. I'm currently using an old Patriot Box Office.

Giving up Torrents.

Yes, I've given up the use of Torrents. I'm now using an alternate source of content, I've gone back to using Usenet Newsgroups.
First, why have I given up the use of Torrents? The Torrent protocol is awesome in its efficiency and for many files, availability of content. I've often achieved 8Mbps via torrenting files from peers. The one downside is that your IP address is necessarily publicly available to everyone in the swarm. This means of course that you can be tracked, and if your ISP is given a good reason, can be contacted. Now just in case you accidently download some copyrighted material, which some company kicks up a fuss about, you could receive, like a friend of mine recently, a warning from your ISP to cease and desist. There have been rare cases where people have been sued. This is extremely unlikely for any given individual, but still possible.
The alternative is to either use an anonymising proxy, or VPN service to torrent through, but this costs money, and slows down the torrent feed. I've opted to use Usenet Newsgroups. Yes, they are still alive and well, and predate the web. All the interesting stuff is in the binaries newsgroups, and free newservers just don't host them, because of the volume of traffic they have to support. So you need a premium news provider.
I'm using the Newsdemon non-expiring block plans, which means I can download content from the server at about 12Mbps at a cost of around 10c per gigabyte. It's not a lot of money. Because this is a simple one to one download, it's much harder for anyone else to see what you are downloading, and if you are really paranoid, you can enable SSL connections, so even your ISP can't snoop on the data. If you want.
While this gives you access, there are a lot of bait, virus and trojan downloads on the binaries groups, so you can't just go and download stuff that looks ok, you need to go via an NZB indexing service which finds real content for you. I use NZBMatrix. The premium version costs £7 for 10 years. Next you need something that can download content from NZB files, and I am using http://sabnzbd.org/. It's an awesome little service that runs on your PC, and you can set it up to automatically schedule the downloading of your bookmarks in NZBMatrix during your off-peak bandwidth usage.
Then there's this other little awesome service that runs on your your PC called SickBeard. It knows all about TV shows, and uses sabnzbd to automatically download TV shows you are interested in, as soon as they appear in the newsgroups. Once configured, they just start appearing on you local disk, ready to be streamed to your media player.
The end result is I can sit on the couch, bookmark a video at NZBMatrix via my iPad, and a short while later it's available for my media player under the TV. Or via SickBeard, it is as simple as receiving an email saying the latest episode of my favourite TV program is now available to watch, and just, play it. [Thanks to a friend at work for the heads up.]

[update - 10/12/2012] NZBMatrix has just gone down. Change your Sickbeard search provider to "Sick Beard Index".

Review of "The Australian" iPad App

I've been using the iPad app "The Australian" since it was released.
There is a lot to like about the app, but there are also some significant issues which need to be addressed, and some issues which clearly News Digital Media are struggling with, most obviously the advertising vs usability tradeoff.
First of all, there are many excellent features in this app. It is cheaper and much more convenient than buying print media, and perfect for reading on the bus. It only requires a connection to actually sync down content, making it better than a website with the wifi only iPad.
The navigation is not too bad, plenty of categories, and you can read in a choice of three font sizes. The 'share' button is useful for when you do have a connection, and want to share via Facebook. The recent addition of the 'Gallery' adds excellent topical photographs every few days.
However, there are a few problems, most of which should be easily addressed, yet the early rate of improvements seems to have slowed to a crawl.
Sometimes selecting a news article during a content sync will crash the app.
Sometimes rotating the screen forcing the aspect change while reading an article will crash the app.
Somtimes dismissing a full screen ad before it has loaded will crash the app.
The crashes are very annoying, and it seems to me there are thread race and possibly resource usage problems that need to be addressed, and really shouldn't be that big of a deal for professional developers, and something they have probably already fixed and is waiting for the next release.
Advertising is always going to be tricky. I understand that it helps to fund the production of the content and the software development, and keeps the subscription relatively low. However, if the advertising continues to be as horribly intrusive as it currently is, and has been since an update in December, I can't see that they'll keep enough volume of customers to make any of it worthwhile. I can deal with a full screen popup ad that happens occasionally, and that I can dismiss. What is horribly annoying is that now there is a small ad on every single page, and even if the ad space isn't used, it still exists, empty.
The trouble with this advertising is that it completely cramps the layout of every content page. I had to switch from portrait view to landscape view to get a comfortable line width, sacrificing page length and having to scroll much more. Also, you can't now effectively use the left side for scrolling since you then touch the ad. You can't dismiss the small ads, so they are a constant distraction from the article, and end up having no impact, because you try to just ignore the space entirely. They only thing worse that could be done here, is to make the ads flash or animate. I can only suggest News does some proper usability testing, and maybe look at being able to slide the ads out of the view, leaving only a tab, or at least allow the ad to scroll up the page with the content so it doesn't remain for the whole article.
Minor annoyances that should also be looked at include adding a page scolling indicator like every other iPad app that has a scrolling page, so you know where you are up to when reading the page. Also annoying, when you change aspect ratio, the page resets to the top of the content. It would also be useful for the font size setting to be more persistent. Probably the video needs to be compressed a little more as you have to wait for most of any video to download before starting to watch.
Hopefully we'll see some further improvements over the next couple of months, otherwise I'll be looking around when my subscription is up.

[Update 29/3/11]
Troy Skillen of News Digital Media Support emailed me with:
"We are passing your blogpost to our Editorial and Product Teams and ensuring they take the time to read what you have written as we believe there are many points that can be taken from your piece moving forward. We are hoping the shortcomings within the app can be addressed sooner rather than later & are currently pushing for the advertising and crash issues to be dealt with as a priority."


[Update 9/7/11]
I've recently decided to not continue my subscription until the crashes are fixed. I've just had enough, it is very annoying. I'm using the SMH app now. Recently Troy Skillen (sic) emailed me with "We decided to push back the update after the release of Fairfax's enhanced apps as we decided there was more we could do to be competitive. We hope to be able to release more news about the update very shortly"

[Update 30/7/11]
I should note now that an update has been released, although I haven't used it yet.

The Technician

Just finished reading The Technician by Neal Asher.
Damn, Asher just tells a fine story. You're not quite sure where it is going at the beginning, but The Technician has a good pace that keeps you reading, and dribbles out key information along the way so that you never feel that the novel is over before you get there. By the middle of the book I was wondering how this wouldn't be over in the next two chapters, but then, the story gets just that little bit more complicated, takes a turn, and you're off again. This was a very cleverly constructed read, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Not as much of the visceral, mind blowing, gut wrenching death and destruction as in some of his other work, oh, ok, except for the end. It isn't like he's not going to have it at all. Oh, and the bit in the middle. The Polity AIs cop a bit of a blow to their arrogance at the sharp end of some new tech which I enjoyed. Damn smarmy AIs.
Excellent.

Mech

Just finished reading Mech by B.V. Larson.
I don't remember having read a book with so much bloodshed and gore! I was cringing at a couple of places as there was no pulling back from evisceration, even of women and children. Even Neal Asher doesn't usually detail a gore fest of innocents.
So the basic story is that of a planet colonised in the last few hundred years, and then the original owners owners arrive home and start a re-invasion of their territory. The aliens have a very different mindset, and take various forms having been evolved (or engineered) into castes, each optimised for their different roles. Gorefest ensues.
The human political scene is quite amusing as well, filled with corruption and assassination and power games.
This was a thouroughly enjoyable read, and I'll be going back for part two.
Oh, and check the price on this. $3 on Amazon. Sweet read, well paced and well written.

Containment

Just finished reading Containment by Christian Cantrell.
This was one of those cheap books you pick up for three dollars, and read on the off chance that it could be any good. Frankly, the cover art did it for me, and for three dollars was willing to judge a book by its cover.
With a little known author like this, I might be willing to just give it up partway through if it really sucks, and honestly, there was one chapter early on where this was the case. It seemed very unrealistic.
But then it seriously picked up. With a little bit of mystery and deception and a very dark undercurrent, I hammered through the rest of the book.
The cover art turned out to be completely misleading, but then I wasn't disappointed with the read, so that's OK I guess.

Samba in Ubuntu 10.10 very very slow

After upgrading my Ubuntu server to 10.10, I found that transferring files to it was horribly slow. As in 200kB/s slow, over a 1Gb network. There were no errors, it was just horribly horribly slow.
After some searching on the topic, I found that the socket options line that was recommended in the smb.conf file in previous versions:

socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY \

               SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192

was actually causing this issue. Anything specified here that is actually required seems to be default with 10.10 and the corresponding kernel, so I just commented this line out, and things were back to a reasonable speed.
I'm guessing that specifying the buffer sizes causes havoc with the current implementation.
Gah!

NASA STEREO Super Sun Day.

Today, NASA's STEREO spacecrafts, A, and B, will be on exactly opposite sides of the sun, and will be taking pictures of its entire surface at the same time. These spacecraft have been travelling round Earth's orbit in opposite directions since October 2006, providing stereo vision of the Sun. Super Sun Day! More at the main site.
Update: and here it is. Cool.

Empire of Light

Just finished reading this by Gary Gibson.
This follows on from Nova War, and after reading that said I would reserve judgement.
Meh. It was OK. No big surprises. Could have had more about the Swarm - that was cool.
Next!

Holiday Retro: Tintin

A couple of years ago, I spent a lot of holiday time at Christmas playing Faery Tale. This year, in a similar bout of looking backedness, I read a whole bunch of Tintin on the iPad.
Read through about eight adventures and enjoyed it very muchly. Of course, it's pretty silly stuff, but makes for a great break.
Black Island, Black Gold and Flight 714 my favorites. Ok, the two moon ones also fun.

C++ Landscape

C++ Lands

Nicely done.