Blog Currents – 30-May-2012

 In a recent survey funded by none other than the US Government the conclusion was that the more science someone knew the more likely they were to be sceptical of the global warming movement. In contrast the less educated were more likely to believe. The irony of the results were that the survey was not intended to produce results showing anything like that. Instead those carrying out the survey were approaching it from the perspective that carbon-driven global warming is ongoing and extremely dangerous and this was the consensus. Oxymoron alert, scientific consensus.

As a scientist and one who believes strongly in the scientific methodology I find the concept of science by popular consensus abhorrent. In the IT world, for the most part, computing is about a series of logical results based on known inputs, known processes and known outputs. There are going to be a few curves in there but generally it is a lot of straight lines, decision trees, rules based processing and a generated result based on the data provided.

The global warming movement is the opposite of that kind of thinking. They start with an outcome and work backwards adjusting the processes and rules and inputs to generate the results they want. When reality doesn’t agree they simply backfill and adjust again. The formula for climate is highly complex, has many variables, some of which are as yet unknown, a partial set of best guess equations and involves a lot of chaos like influences. It is unlikely that humans will be able to come up with a nice neat set of equations any time soon. Basic logic suggests that the whole system cannot be reduced to the two variables of CO2 and temperature that ignores the effect of the Sun, cosmic radiation, clouds, motion through space and a host of other factors. Any IT person would need about an hour to chase down papers, research, and real world measurements that can shred the current global warming dogma.  

Yes I know that this is not really IT based but it is important and it affects everyone. The study goes on to suggest that those on the Left tend to be "egalitarian communitarians" while those more to the right tend to be "hierarchical individualists." Those in the latter category have a higher scientific and technology knowledge base and a better grasp of maths, yes those in the IT world generally fit more easily into this category. So for those that want to keep the world alarmed teaching them science and maths is not the best approach and indeed in many Western nations, like Australia, there has been a move away from these subjects into the softer ones, mostly because the West is overburdened by Left governments. This is also why any communication on global warming, a.k.a. the truism climate change has been done without any reference to the science, partly because there is so little to support the thesis but mostly because governments understand how to manipulate people.

To summarise in pseudoscience speak “Effective strategies include use of culturally diverse communicators, whose affinity with different communities enhances their credibility, and information-framing techniques that invest policy solutions with resonances congenial to diverse groups. Perfecting such techniques through a new science of science communication is a public good of singular importance.” I think it is just a way to get more funding for meaningless research.

It has been a quiet week for me. I started a new job building a natural resources database for the local council, real ecology not pretend stuff. I’m also writing a classification system in Delphi for archaeological research, pro bono on this one but it will be used by University of Sydney and others around the world. I did start playing what seems to me to be a graphics version of Rogue called Fate. Real switch off the brain kind of stuff but kills a bit of time when I get bored. I do have Diablo 3 queued up to start sometime in the future, feedback has been OK on this one.

Industry News

The new Samsung S3 was available around the globe this week but only in white. The new “blue colour and special hyperglaze material” model was not to be seen. Samsung says it is because they did not meet specs. The manufacturers say it was because the CAD files were incorrect and they ended up making a bunch of them that were not the right size.

So you think that hard drives are still expensive, well you’re right. Prices are still over fifty percent above pre-flood levels. Western Digital has made out like a bandit after the Seagate factory in Thailand was flooded last year. Seagate is back up and churning out the drives but we poor peons at the buying edge have yet to see the rices fall as PC manufacturers have been buying up supply to put in new machines. Expect the drive makers to milk this for at least a few more months. August is about the time things will start to get back to normal.

Where would we be without leaks? The upcoming Dell Latitude tablet will run Windows 8, have a dual core CPU and a 1366 x 768 pixel 10.8 inch display. There will be a removable battery, fingerprint reader, and some other nice features. Should hit the stores about November, about the same time the iPhone 5 does.

Looks like the Blackberry is on a downward slide with an expected 6000 RIM jobs expected to be lost in the near future.

Remember those 500 million Windows 8 users comment that Steve Ballmer made? Well it seems that Microsoft doesn’t really expect all of those new users but most will be Windows 7 upgrades or more accurately “devices that could upgrade from Win 7 to Win 8.” The number originated from a Windows store blog, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2011/12/06/announcing-the-new-windows-store.aspx. You cold see hove Steve might have made the mistake, assuming that he never read the original and was just reading from some kind of prepared script. In reality most people never upgrade their operating system they tend to just buy a new computer that comes with the latest OS when they sick of the old one being so slow. Organisations upgrade en mass but regular people don’t. Also since Windows 7 apps won’t work on Windows 8 for the most part I don’t see the rush happening soon.

Blog Currents - 2012, May 23

Yes I am bit late this week. I started a new job on Tuesday that threw off my usual schedule. It is back to Excel VBA accessing an SQL Server database. Since I am working in Excel 2010 I get to create an add-in that creates a new ribbon tab and creates the links etc. to call the underlying VBA. This is a bit easier with Excel 2010 but it is best to just use an XML editor and build the buttons that way instead of trying to do it dynamically from the programming level. Perhaps it will be a bit better in the next version of Excel/Office.

For those who still read this there is a chance that I will be revisiting my weekly Currents column in the Bangkok Post, stay tuned.

I have been hearing mixed reviews on the new Samsung Galaxy S3. Since I expect to get my hands on one, no not mine but a friends, I’ll have a better idea in a week or two.

I received my new DVICO Android based media player and it is a lump of rubbish. The initial setup had to be from an AV in, something I don’t have on my TV without finding where I hid the special interface cable. I finally managed to do this and the networking is still rubbish. The automated system didn’t work so I finally had to create a manual connection to play a file. The system doesn’t have any HDMI through that I could identify and it forced me to change the audio type depending on if I was playing a stereo or 5.1 DTS file, this is not only annoying but absurd for a new product. I may have better experience notes next week but for the moment, do not rush out and buy one of these.

My Android App of the week is the Open GPS Tracker. I used it to track a long walk on the banks of a river recently and it worked even while it was in my pocket. The application uses the GPS in your phone to track where you go, how fast you go, the elevation, and works out stats like average speed, change in elevation, max speed, time taken and so on. It maps the path to Google Maps and as far as I could tell did so very accurately. An excellent App for those who want to keep track of their exercise, general walking, running and bicycling. Free for Android users of course.

According to Kim Young-ha the Chinese CEO of Samsung, domestic spending within China on technology bits and pieces is slowing down. As an indicator this could have interesting ramifications for the global economy. The overall growth, if it doesn’t get worse, will be about seven percent. During the recent Golden Week TV sales were not good, typically a great buying season for the Chinese. According to IDC however they expect to see a growth of 29.8 percent in spending in China over the next year, driven by strong demand for smartphones and tablets. Given the growth figures I have seen out of China I think the Samsung estimate is a lot better than the IDC figures. Perhaps the IDC is getting their data from the same place the Australian Government is getting their projected carbon price data?

Industry News

According to Steve Ballmer of Microsoft by 2013 500 million people will be using Windows 8. This announcement was supported by the statement that Windows 8 would be "deepest, broadest and most impactful" Windows software ever created by Microsoft and “certainly the most important piece of work we've done."

So let’s take a stroll down memory lane, shall we? On the release of Vista and Office 2007 he said that “these are the most amazing versions of Windows and Office ever." For Windows XP he said that it was a "worldwide phenomenon, a new standard for personal computing and a huge milestone for Microsoft, for the industry and for computer users everywhere." I guess that either he has a short memory or Windows 8 is really that good. Probably not.

For a start Windows 7 is expected to ship about 350 million units this year. Given the general downward trend on the global economy unless Win 8 is going to be really cheap then 500 million is a dream rather than a good forward estimate. According to IDC about 350 million PCs were shipped in 2011. I guess they must be expecting a lot from the upcoming range of tablets?

So tablets. The Aero look of Windows Vista is gone. Windows 7 apps will not work on Windows 8 for ARM (Windows RT) . If you are using Arm then you will get Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. If you are using x86/64 tablets then you pay extra for these. Perhaps they mean Smart Phones? According to Canalysis these outsold PCs in 2011 i.e. tablets, netbooks, notebooks and desktops totaled 415 million for last year, compared to 488 million for smart phones. Compared to Android, Windows phones are way down the list so I don’t see this happening either. Perhaps he did dream it?

The US has entered the 21st century! No they are not starting to make devices that support 220-240 volts. In the most recent space launch from NASA, the SpaceX Falcon, if you listen to from 1:10 after launch you will hear : "Altitude 5.3 kilometers, velocity 225 meters per second, and downrange distance of six-tenths of a kilometer." Yes that is right they have switched to metric. This should mean no more crashing landers into Mars and compatible computer systems between countries for future launches.

Not that long ago I write about how Chrome was starting to make an impact against IE as the number one browser. The previous record was beating out IE for two days in a row. The latest figures show that Chrome has overtaken IE as the world’s most popular browser by overtaking IE for a full week.  The figures come from StatCounter's Global Stats that looks at usage against 15 billion page views a month from people all over the world with tracking code installed on over three million websites. By area IE is still the most popular in the US and Firefox is in Europe. It is the Asian and South American figures that have brought Chrome to number one overall.

In one of those why did they bother studies HIS iSuppli has concluded that the majority of counterfeit electronics come from Asia and in particular China. The levels are getting to the point where they are affecting the global supply chain. Ironically the USA led in 2011, just. Add up Asia and they have 64 percent but the suppliers are also good at hiding their origins so it may be higher. Some of the copies are as good as the originals but others are poor substitutes and dangerous.

Blog Currents – May 16, 2012

 Well a week has passed and I ended up going back to Delphi, mostly because what I was working on is for my father. With a lot of Web searching and time in forums I have managed to solve most of the problems I was having. It may be my past experience but working with Delphi is still a lot easier than with .NET under Visual Studio. It comes down to the way objects are defined.

For those not familiar with an object it is a bit like a ball is an object. It had a name, “ball” and a set of properties. If we consider the ball type: tennis then these properties might be green, furry, can bounce with width of three inches. It is the same idea when programming. A text box for example will also have a name, something all object have, but a lot of different properties like read-only, visible, and enabled and so on. Objects also have methods or things that they can do or things that can be done with them. For the tennis ball these could include bounce, serve, drop and pick-up. For our text box it could be create, destroy, fill with text, clear text etc. Objects can also have event. For our ball these could include After Served, Before Dropped, Bounced. For our text box, when changed, on enter, on exit, on clear.

Thinking about things as objects became the normal programming paradigm a while back. Of course .NET has objects as do most modern programming languages. There are different ways to implement them however. Consider getting data from and to a table. For .NET this requires a connection object, a binding course, and a table object. Delphi requires the same thing but in many cases you can get away with just the connection and say a query. In Delphi the datasource (binding equivalent) is very simple with the intelligence kept with the connection and the table or query. For .Net there are a huge number of bits and pieces that need to be manipulated to get the same results that makes it all so much more complicated unless you are very familiar with it all.

Nothing to report on Mass Effect 3 this week, I have been too busy with other stuff.

I did download some bits and pieces to start looking at some Android development. I have a decompression algorithm a friend of mine devised, for SCUBA diving, that I want to implement on my Galaxy S2 to help with dive plans. It is not a high priority but it would be cool to get it done sometime.

Sp what do you do if you are bored and happen to have a bunch of old floppy drives lying around? Well you could go here https://github.com/SammyIAm/Moppy, follow the instructions and start playing tunes using the sounds made by a floppy drive as it moves the heads back and forwards. People with way too much time on their hands have created classics like the Star Wars Imperial March, the theme from Star Trek The Next Generation, Mario Brothers and other with the gamer, sci-fi focus.

Industry News

Working hard to increase its name as the world’s most evil empire Apple is pushing for more patent decisions, in its favour of course. One of the latest concerns touch keyboards and the US Patent and Trademark Office in all of its iGnoble glory has granted Apple a patent being a "Method, system, and graphical user interface for selecting a soft keyboard." This apparently covers a keyboard on which letters are changed to numbers or symbols when the right button is pressed. The patent gets a little strange after that and goes on to describe buttons that are separate from the keyboard e.g. floating above it. You might think that this is some kind of sci-fi stuff that is far removed from our current keyboard technology but remember that Apple attacked Samsung for having icons with rounded corners that ‘copied’ Apple’s look and feel. Expect lots of law suits to come out of this, somehow.

Drat there may not be a colour e-ink Kindle model out this year, well at least according to a Reuters source. What is coming out in the next month or so is a built in light for those dark nights or when reading in the closet. Had to happen of course as Barnes & Noble has announced a new version of their Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, similar to the Indiglo-style watch illumination. There is a rumour of an 8.9in Kindle Fire coming in Q4. This will coincide with a new competitor from Google, stay tuned.

So how does Siri respond when asked “what’s the best cell phone ever?” According to one report Nokia's Lumia 900. This suggests two things, one that so far the iPhone is not filtered by some mega corporate watchdog, yet. Also it turns out that Siri uses the Wolfram Alpha database for answers and the Nokia Lumia is the phone that Alpha offers to customers. The response is apparently based on a massive four reviews posted on the Best Buy website. Moral of the story is no matter how much you may like Siri’s dulcet tones she may not always be giving you the best responses.

Ultrabooks seem to be trending towards SSD drives for the future or at least the hybrid versions that are faster than regular drives. The problem is that tablets boot up faster because they are all SSD and as always the punters want more speed. Seagate loves this idea of course. With an expected doubling of the SSD market this year the cost per GB will fall and ultrabook prices will drop below the $1000 mark. An Ultrabook is more versatile than a tablet so if they can get the prices down it will attract those in the $800-$900 price point. The kind of technology we can expect to see soon is a hybrid drive with 320 GB and 20-32 GB of NAND, plenty for an OS and some apps.

Finally for this week some more future stuff. Everyone knows that smaller is better for electronics but getting it smaller has thrown up a lot of problems lately. Apparently it is hard to get a “ballistic" electron to follow a consistent path. According to a group from University of New South Wales, University of Oregon, Niels Bohr Institute and Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge if you remove dopants from the silicon substrate this will help the problem. I know, I know you always thought that might have been the problem but who was listening to you, right? When they solve this things will be able to get smaller and you will be able to brag about your new quantum level device, in the nice red colour.

Blog Currents – 09 May 2012

 Ever since Embarcadero took over Delphi I have avoided looking at the latest versions. That changed recently when I installed XE2 with the idea to upgrade an older program I had written with Delphi 7, still the most popular version. Before I got around to that I decided to try connecting to an Access database I had lying around. Well let’s just say I won’t be using XE2 anytime soon unless I can simply recompile my older program with any problems.

You would think that in the modern age it should be as easy as dropping a database connection onto the screen, clicking on some drop down to select Access and then the file location and away you go. Nope, nothing like that at all. So I set up an ODBC connection, tested it and tried connecting to that. I managed to specify ODBC and then the connection name but it still would not make a connection to the Access database. I gave up at that point because what used to be easy to understand and do under Delphi 7 is now too complex under XE2.

So I fired up Visual Studio 2010 and created a Windows Forms project. Next I clicked on the database tab and asked for a new connection. There was a drop down from which to select Access and a field to put in the file location. The I right clicked on that connection and selected Detail; then I simply dragged it onto the form. All the fields from the data base appeared along with a navigation bar. I ran the program and the records were displayed. I still have some other things to do to get it working like the Access version but so far it has been infinitely easier and simpler than trying to do it under XE2 and my VB.Net exposure has been somewhat limited to date compared to years under the Delphi environment.

It is sad when things that used to be and should be easier have changed enough so that getting things done becomes too difficult to bother with. Sorry Embacadero but a big FAIL so far. Added to the way they treated a simple request a couple of years ago concerning Delphi 5 and I recommend that everyone avoids this organisation.

Apart from that it has been a fairly quite week for me IT wise. Except for my upgrade from Android 2.4 to 4 for my Samsung S2. The upgrade itself went fairly smoothly after I installed the latest version of the Samsung Kies app. Using this seemed simpler than trying to do a download and applying it in another way. The whole process took about 40 minutes and the result was, well interesting.

First off the interface seemed faster. Actions seemed quicker and there were some obvious improvements to the contacts and logs. On the major down side it messed up all my screen arrangements so I’ll have to do them all again. It also seemed to have a problem connecting to any e-mail client. In the end the only solution was to remove each account and re add it to get the e-mail flows working again. The App Store was still working fine but my brother who has the same phone could not get Blue tooth to work correctly.  All I can say it whoever released this version without testing it is an idiot. I’m sure there are a bunch of new features to learn but the S3 also just came out and I suspect I’ll have one of those in a few months’ time.

I read a ‘review’ or comparison of the Samsung Galaxy S3 with the iPhone 5. The writer was lauding the iPhone 5 and extolling its virtues. The joke here is that the iPhone 5 is not due out until November meaning the S3 will have been whipping the iPhone 4S’s arse for six months before the new one even comes out. The specs are essentially secret and there is not even a picture of one. How then can someone compare it to anything? The answer is of course the blind faith of the Apple lover cannot conceive of anything being better than their beloved Apple products so they will always be better, even when they aren’t, which is most of the time these days. Oh and iTunes still sucks big time.

Industry News

Statcounter tells us that for one day in March Google’s Chrome beat out IE. This month on May 5^th and 6^th it happened again. Actually since that fateful day in March Chrome has managed to take about a day a weekend. The numbers are not big but they are ever so slowly growing. On weekdays the story is different most likely as organisational installations tend to favour IE over any other browser. This may change soon after Microsoft announced that both SharePoint and Microsoft CRM will support other browsers, shock, horror. This means that organisation may no longer be tied to IE as their browser. I suspect that inertia will continue for some time yet.

So when is 500 million not enough? Apparently when it is also the number of Internet users in China. The government there is planning to have 800 million users online by 2015. This will still be a bit under 60 percent of the population but even the Chinese government is complaining about the high cost of optical fibre and the sheer size of the country. Of the 800 mil about 200 will be from the rural areas. Not sure how those poor farmers will be able to afford a computer to connect with but that is a whole other issue.

So the Galaxy S3 has been released. How much better is it really? Slightly bigger 4.8 inch screen, some 4G support, voice control (also in the Android 4 update for the S2), Bluetooth LE and NFC making it the first phone to support both protocols, paired WiFi channels (using two at once) allowing for greater speed. There is a wireless charging kit, i.e. no cable charging. WiFi also supports the 802.11a band with HT40 support up to 40MHz of bandwidth. There is a bunch of other WiFi stuff that allows for collaboration but you can look that up for yourselves. All in all I suspect that the S3 will still support more protocols than the iPhone 5, whenever that may come out.  

When licensing kills the market. Digital media playback in Windows 8 will not include DVD support, unless the manufacturer has included the license as part of their combined offering. In fact Windows Media Centre will be sold for an extra cost in Windows 8. In reality this means that Windows 8 customers will end up paying more than others because the PC makers will license the required codecs themselves to enable DVD playback. Who wants to buy a computer where you can’t play a DVD?

Finally for this week I have started playing Mass Effect 3 the latest game from Bioware. So far it has all the trademarks of a modern game. Lots of movie bits interspersed with some play time. Not sure why things are going this way but they are and it is annoying. More on this one after I get into it a bit more.