Aviation update miscellany: good, bad, constructive

"...was at 6,000 feet when he declared an emergency, pulled the parachute his plane was equipped with, let go of the control panel and floated to the ground about one and a half miles into the woods off Still Water Lane.
"[He] was able to walk away from the site and place a call to 911 to inform them he was searching for emergency personnel and thought he had spotted some of them looking for him."

"What strikes me on reading this discussion is that the slow pace of implementation of the NextGen air traffic system -- here and in Europe -- means that we don't prevent these preventable accidents (if it turns out that weather caused the demise of this [Air France 447] flight).   As you may remember, providing integrated weather displays to pilots, as well as controllers, is a key part of the Next Gen effort.  It's absurd that commercial pilots don't have these tools.   An article describing how the weather product fits into Next Gen is attached."

"You know what we (meteorologists) call the oceanic regions?
"The big blue data void.
"It is hard to explain that to people who only look at CONUS." [Continental US, which has radar stations and other monitoring tools wherever you look.]

Your point on higher-tech and more real-time weather information being available for GA ["general aviation," small private plane] pilots versus airline pilots is well taken, but disregards an important advantage us 121 [airline] pilots have over aircraft with these XM weather uplinks....

I fly for a Northwest, now Delta, regional and we have access to the same ACARS delivered weather updates as the big boys. [ACARS is an automated data-collection service that shares info among planes in the air.]   Granted they are delivered in text and require manual plotting, but once done they are very accurate and enormously effective.  Base and/or composite reflectivity radar maps can be very deceiving to a pilot flying at FL370, since a lot of the weather depicted on those maps is very low.  ACARS coordinates and altitude of cell tops is often much better information, especially when considering whether to pick your way through a line at night or take a long detour. In addition the dispatchers themselves [airline employees who monitor the flights from the ground], being another human in the loop with even more information, can be invaluable in saving your bacon.  Between myself, my FO [first officer], and my dispatcher, I've got three eyes on the problem- which I'd take over any Nexrad/XM maps any day of the week.
 
Now I admit I'm spoiled flying as I do mostly over the continental US.  Transoceanic would be somewhat trickier given, as you say, the dearth of other traffic over the same route serving as guinea pigs.  That said, given what I know about the resources available to the Air France pilots, I am at a loss for why they found themselves on the midst of such a violent storm.

About the internet, the Atlantic, and Iran

Coincidence? Paranoia? Virus?

An Airbus captain on getting into bad weather

As a point of reference I'm an A-320 Captain for NWA (soon to be Delta but happy to be getting a paycheck) with over 12,000 hours. While I agree that it's entirely possible and perhaps even likely that the Air France 447 crew did indeed proceed into an area that they shouldn't have I can say that if his radar isn't up to snuff or if they misinterpreted the presentation there are no other resources for them in that situation. At least over the continental US we have other aircraft reports and ground controllers who can make suggestions.

Most civilians (non aviators would I guess be a better term) are quite surprised to find that they have better access to up to date weather resources while sitting at home on the computer than I do. Once I'm airborne it's just the radar and who I can talk to on the radio (ATC, other aircraft, my dispatcher). While I'm told that modern business jets have satellite links to provide views and weather from various vantage points we who carry the most people do not. At main stations I can pull up numerous local and regional radar presentations which are very helpful. However when operating out of small stations this isn't always possible and once I get into my aircraft I'm blind except for the radar in the nose of the jet. It works well but it isn't foolproof, if I could see the same things airborne that I can while at a computer terminal we, my aircraft and passengers, would all benefit.

If any good can come of this accident I hope it will lead to a discussion and implementation of better weather resources for the airline industry. I'm proud of what we do and our overall safety record but this is one area where we could make great advances.

Herdict: now, in Arabic and Chinese!

Wrapup on papers, Craigslist, etc

Hearst, were he living as a 'Rupert Murdoch' of today, would own Craigslist by now, would have an industrywide micropayment system, would have recruited legions of readers as hyper-local bloggers, and otherwise employed the tools and resources of our day to advance his cause just as he brought cartoons, drawings, and later photographs and color to his readers in his. 

My wife owns a boutique real estate agency in Sydney, Australia.  Every Thursday she'd have to submit the ads for her properties to the Sydney Morning Herald who had a monopoly on real estate advertising -- pre internet.  The likelihood of the desired ad appearing in print, in the desired location, on the desired day was about 60%.  (Imagine her customers looking through the ads for their house and not finding it!) The service was arrogant as well as unreliable and my wife wouldn't mind seeing the SMH go up in flames.  On the news side, the SMH is now about splashing electronic ads right in the middle of a story I might be reading: equally arrogant! This feels very much like a fat monopoly that will be overtaken by something better.

I used to be a print subscriber to the SMH; when their internet site caught up and I upgraded to a decent LCD monitor, it was easier to read online without having to consume and recycle a broadsheet containing 90% unconsumed waste.  I am a news junkie and I seriously worry about losing access to good journalism.  However, I am willing to pay a few cents per story per day and I am sure that somehow, someday, someone will find a way to aggregate my pennies with everyone else's to give good journalists a good living.

It seems to me there is a huge advertising hole that newspapers could fill when they are ready to move past the blame game and start thinking more creatively.

Continue reading "Wrapup on papers, Craigslist, etc " »

More on Google, Craigslist, and who's killing newspapers

It's not at all about blame-casting. It's about proper diagnosis for treatment and recovery. If papers are critically ill from classified revenue woes (Craigslist, eBay, informal email, ...) but they falsely self-diagnose as being sick from over exposure in Google News, then they'll end up closing their borders by withdrawing from news aggregation sites at Google, Yahoo, MSN, and elsewhere. That won't hurt Internet companies [like Google] at all, but it will leave publishers with fewer new visitors, less online monetization opportunities, and still obliviously infected with disappearing classified revenues. They will get sick faster, and journalism as democracy's conscience will weaken. That will hurt every other company, every citizen, and nearly every country. 

The only blame belongs to the publishers. Craigslist, like all startups, was originally funded with pennies on the dollar compared with what media empires spend. It still is! Craigslist has not been bought/co-opted/copied by any of the major publishers even though doing so would have been a natural idea. Readers are moving online but publishers act as though they will go there only if dragged rather than racing to their only life saving destination. News is valuable, but you can no longer get it in printed form as it is hours old by the time you get your paper -- CNN and online news sites had it hours ago! Analysis is worth waiting for, but that is what magazines like The Atlantic are all about. Newspapers will never be about selling your old BBQ again. Ads at random, scattered between unrelated stories, are not part of the future of shopping. 

These are the issues for papers to agonize about; to wring their hands about; and maybe even to beg money to solve. Unfortunately, they've been copying the ideas and technologies invented and introduced by William Randolph Hearst for so long that they forgot his example of how to innovate for the modern day. Hearst, were he living as a 'Rupert Murdoch' of today, would own Craigslist by now, would have an industrywide micropayment system, would have recruited legions of readers as hyper-local bloggers, and otherwise employed the tools and resources of our day to advance his cause just as he brought cartoons, drawings, and later photographs and color to his readers in his.

Who exactly is killing the press

Design aspects of software: maps as "thinking tools"

Continue reading "Design aspects of software: maps as "thinking tools"" »

If you're looking for something new to worry about...[IMPROVED!!]

There's a long history on this score, mainly involving the European Galileo project, plus Russian and Chinese efforts; plus the Pentagon's gradual willingness to make high-precision signals available to the world generally, rather than deliberately fuzzing the open-use civilian version. All for another time; I invite you to look it up for yourself. 

But the nightmare scenario no one thought to worry about was that the US-run system would start to crumble and wear out. Arrrgghh!
_____
* IMPROVEMENT!!!:  Let me quickly shift from Arrrggghh to OOOOOPSSS!  Let's entirely forget that struck-out part above, in light of this item from TelecomAsia.net that a technically sophisticated friend just sent me.

Sugar Sync

New meta-theme: design!

•  Design of cities, including the ones springing up all over China, as hinted at in this introductory Beijing-vs-Shanghai post several weeks back.
• Design of "tools for thinking," which generally includes software and which I find particularly provocative and rich in the emerging (for me) intersection of straight text and graphics. I don't mean photo illustrations; I mean "mapping" and "visualization" programs of several sorts that I, as a pure-text guy from way back, find increasingly useful.
• Design of hardware for thinking and learning, not excluding the familiar Kindle and the even more familiar PC and Mac.
• Design of the working environment, the reduce the threat posed by the Number One Killer of Modern-day Thought, non-stop distraction. 

More on the F-22, the F-35, and big expensive airplanes

Browser update

Am testing a site these days, so I keep 3 browsers open: IE, FF 3.0.1 and Chrome. In two days, I have had four hard FF crashes -- unheard of. FF also lost track of all saved passwords, although it recovered  (maybe thanks to Xmarks).

BTW, Chrome seems ever stronger. If this were college, IE would be the entitled rich kid who acts smart, but isn't, Firefox the impressive high achiever who is actually a bit lazy and dilettantish, and Chrome the kid who works nights to pay bills, is rock solid, and is steadily getting stronger and stronger.

Or, if you prefer, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. As to Opera -- the garden variety A student of sound quality but without a compelling or differentiating architecture -- I think she makes a fine Secretary of State.

More on Firefox 3.0.10

Stability problems with Firefox 3.0.10?

The new Nigeria

"It could have been the Kindle..."

Same two items, in opened-and-readable view. Each shows the screen saver that comes on if you haven't been turning pages for a few minutes. Old on the bottom, new at the top, ever-handy Chinese-English dictionary in the upper left just for a color highlight:

What's the difference between old and new? Screen slightly brighter on new version, but old is plenty clear. Battery life also somewhat better, but plenty long in original version -- days and days. New has easier navigation; NextPage/PreviousPage keys better designed to avoid accidental pressing of keys; and a much svelter look and feel (below):



All in all the new Kindle seemed the ideal machine for ... my wife!, who initially scoffed but now is a devotee. Plus, sticking with the doughty Kindle Classic shores up my credentials as an outstanding husband. It's probably worth noting that the K1/K2 contrast is of purely antiquarian interest, since the original models are no longer sold.

Next, future of books. My friend Jacob Weisberg, of Slate, has rashly ignored my advice on how to avoid becoming a Kindle bore and published his paean to the device several weeks ago, here. I'll solidify my non-bore status by mildly dissenting from his view. Jacob tells us that:

The Kindle 2 signals that after a happy, 550-year union, reading and printing are getting separated. It tells us that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.

I say: sort of.

Continue reading ""It could have been the Kindle..."" »

This too is puerile but pretty funny

I admit that this creeps me out a little (Lou Pai + search engine dept)

Good tech news: SugarSync for BlackBerry

The BlackBerry application is very advanced and it brings capabilities not present before in the SugarSync offering... allowing users to access and share remotely all the SugarSync data available in all of their computers. ...From the road you can easily review documents, send them to colleagues, and collaborate with them and see in real time the changes they may have made to files present in a given shared folder.

But that is not all. The BlackBerry client allows users to open and EDIT files ON the Blackberry while traveling and makes those updates quickly available for others.

Xobni's side of the story

Thank you for your posts about Xobni. We were disappointed to read about Corby Kummer's bad experience with our product. We take performance and stability of our software very seriously and have spent over 5 months working out bugs and optimizing speed prior to releasing the product from beta. After 2M+ downloads, we are unaware of any user that has experienced Corby's issue.

We have reached out to Corby directly, but in the meantime we have begun researching the issue. At this point we don't believe that Xobni itself caused his issue. Instead, we believe when he installed Xobni (any software in this case), it triggered a rare Windows bug or registry corruption. Of course, we don't rule out the issue is with Xobni, but it seems likely it is a Windows bug similar to this Window's RSL (registry size limit) issue (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/189119).

Regardless, it is a bad issue, and even if Xobni is uninstalled, we want to make sure it is fully resolved. We will coordinate with Microsoft support. Though Corby had a bad experience, I hope you will give the new Xobni a try, like thousands of new users each day.

You are welcome to reach out to us, even on Twitter (@Xobni), to tell us about your experiences. We have had incredibly positive feedback so far like that from your colleague Barry Simon. If any of your readers encounter a dramatic issue, please feel free to have them contact Xobni support or me directly.

Thanks again,
Jeff Bonforte
jeff at xobni dot com
CEO, Xobni
PS: You can also tell Barry we are working on some more advanced search options that should please him.

More on Chinese cyber-spying

These hacker groups seem not to be working for the Chinese government. They don't seem to be coordinated by the Chinese military. They're basically young, male, patriotic Chinese citizens, trying to demonstrate that they're just as good as everyone else. As well as the American networks the media likes to talk about, their targets also include pro-Tibet, pro-Taiwan, Falun Gong and pro-Uyghur sites.

The hackers are in this for two reasons: fame and glory, and an attempt to make a living. The fame and glory comes from their nationalistic goals. Some of these hackers are heroes in China....And the money comes from several sources. The groups sell owned computers, malware services, and data they steal on the black market. They sell hacker tools and videos to others wanting to play. They even sell T-shirts, hats and other merchandise on their Web sites.

If anything, the fact that these groups aren't being run by the Chinese government makes the problem worse. Without central political coordination, they're likely to take more risks, do more stupid things and generally ignore the political fallout of their actions.

What should we make of this Chinese cyber-spy story?

"Attributing all Chinese malware to deliberate or targeted intelligence gathering operations by the Chinese state is wrong and misleading... The most significant actors in cyberspace are not states.... In China, the authorities most likely perceive individual attackers [ie, teenagers in internet cafes] as convenient instruments of national power."

Xobni: the magazine titans speak!

For whatever it is worth, I only started using Xobni in November, 2008. I have 1.6 GB main .pst and a total of 5 GBs of pst in my main outlook directory (going back to 2002). Xobni has indexed them all even the ones not loaded into Outlook and I've had no performance issues with it. It is a tool I rely on heavily although its limitations drive me crazy.

The biggest limitation is the inability to do any kind of real Boolean search. You can search for single words or phrases across all mail and can search mail to/from one person for subjects but I've yet to find a way to search for given words in the body of all messages to/from person x.

I downloaded and installed [Xobni], and waited for it to index everything, during which it slowed everything to molasses. I assumed it was the initial indexing that was making everything so slow...

Continue reading "Xobni: the magazine titans speak!" »

It's not just the Chinese

The mobile phone versus face-to-face thing is the norm in India as well, and again, is not considered rude or even unusual by the locals. I attended a family wedding in New Delhi a couple of years ago, and the priest took several calls during the ceremony. Taking our cue from the bride's parents, everybody paused while he took each call, and then resumed as if [nothing had happened]. Apparently another priest had failed to show up at a wedding across town, and that family were ringing round all the possibles...

Things everyone in China knows, but...

•  No one uses voicemail. When some one calls you on your mobile phone, you generally pick it up. Mobile calls take precedence over face-to-face conversation, which is generally interrupted by a call. [Too many times to count, I have seen people take mobile-phone calls while giving a speech or presiding at a meeting. It's the norm, not something rude.]
  
  
• China uses SMS more intensively. SMS may have become entrenched because of the low cost of sending text messages. The first thing Chinese do in the morning is check their IM first, not their email. [Though, this assumes they turned off the phone at night!]
  
  
• Instant messaging, combined with SMS, is a hugely popular means of communication. China's leading IM platform, QQ (Company: Tencent (HK:0700)), has 350 mm users-over 50 times the audience of Twitter! [Two days ago on the Beijing subway, I counted 25 people in the same car as me all typing out or reading text messages and only two actually talking on the phone. Also, you're never out of mobile-phone coverage in China -- on subways, in elevators, wherever. Discussion of reasons some other time.]
  
  
• Only 56% of all Chinese internet users have email addresses. [If you want to reach a busy American, you send email to the Blackberry. That gets you nowhere here.]
  
  
• Ownership of PCs is much lower, especially in 2nd and 3rd tier cities, where heavy PC usage is at Internet cafes.
  
  
• Unlike the West, where e-commerce was Web 1.0 and social media is Web 2.0, China's internet usage started as a social phenomenon first and is just now moving to more utilitarian purposes.

On Google sync tools

Technology as friend of tradition! (Chinese language dept.)

3) The new characters are easier to write but harder to understand. A nonobvious point but an important one. Consider the English word pronounced "for." When spoken, it could be ambiguous. When written, it's immediately obvious whether we mean for, four, or fore.  Same with "right" -- potentially confusing when heard, immediately obvious when read as right, write, wright, or rite. And -- strangely -- characters have a counterpart to this problem, made worse by simplification. (This is not even getting into the related but different topic of words pronounced the same and distinguishable mainly by their characters-- as if the for/four/fore problem came up all the time.)

The two characters below, which mean "east" on the left and "happy" or "enjoyment" on the right, are very easy to tell apart in traditional form (ignore the little dots on the side; part of my home-made effort to illustrate the characters.) :

Here is how much more similar the two of them look when simplified -- again "east" on the left and "happy" on the right:

The "extra information" in the traditional characters is what made them more cumbersome to write, but also easier to tell apart. (Again, think right/write/rite/wright: suppose they were all spelled rite!) Now, here is the interesting part:

Increasingly, Chinese people don't actually have to write (rite? right?) out these characters by hand. More and more, they key them in with mobile phones or at computers. And when they do that, it's just as easy to "write" a traditional-style, complex, information-dense character as  a streamlined new one. (Reason: you key in clues about the character, either its pronunciation or its root form, and then click to choose the one you want.) So -- according to current arguments -- the technology of computers and mobile phones could actually revive an important, quasi-antique style of writing.

Much more on the debate here and here. In practical terms, my bet is that nothing will change. But if you're interested in language or the relationship between technology and styles of thought, it has to be interesting. Or so I contend.

Kids and Kindle

An (unreported?) Kindle phenomenon: 11-year old girl, drove parents crazy by not reading books because totally addicted to electronics, has now transferred total addiction to Kindle 2 - and now does nothing, ever, but read books, one after another. In bed, in the car, while eating - while crossing streets!

[My wife] says, "Let's buy Amazon stock. In six months, the world will have discovered this particular phenomenon." (She is the one who had the sudden insight that this might work for [our daughter].)

F-22 fiesta

Excuse me, but you seem to be caught up in the propaganda of the F-15 mafia.  The F-15 mafia and others have successfully reduced the numbers of F-22 production to the point where economies of scale are no longer possible.*  Unfortunately, those who really know the issues and the data, are not going to engage in a debate, because the result is to trash our country and our capability.  Because of freedom of speech, you are allowed too participate in a debate that has not helped our country.  No complex aircraft is without problems, but maintainers have never had an aircraft which provided so much capability on day one...

The per unit cost isn't even the whole picture, the total life cycle cost is.  And cost is relative.  Do you have the numbers for all alternatives?  Anyway, you don't have the numbers, no one in the unclassifed media does. 

Continue reading "F-22 fiesta" »

Two tech followups: Real Alternative, HerdictWeb (updated)

More on China-US climate issues, more on F-22

 Yesterday I mentioned this detailed and valuable report from the Asia Society and Pew. It turns out that Brookings has just done something similar. Summary here, with links to PDF versions in both English and Chinese. Transcript of event unveiling the report here. I haven't studied the report carefully, but anything in this vein has to be a plus.

Yesterday I said that I enjoyed Mark Bowden's current article but disagreed with its implied endorsement of the F-22 fighter plane. It turns out that Sam Roggeveen, of the Lowy Institute's "The Interpreter" site in Sydney, has already taken up this topic and gotten a reply from Mark. Roggeveen's initial critique here; Mark Bowden's response here. I should note that, like Roggeveen, I did a double-take at the sentence in the original article saying that at least five other countries were now flying planes that matched or bettered the F-15. For context on that point, it's worth looking here. Also, this Reuters story from three months ago talks about the real-world difficulties in maintaining the "stealth" systems for radar-evasion that are supposed to be one of the F-22's main virtues.

The US, China, and saving the world

Spam is making me smarter

I'm not so sure about the timing of this business concept....

Hello,

You have been invited by Xxxxx Xxxxx to join Affluence.org.

Affluence.org is an exclusive community of affluent people dedicated to making life better for both themselves and others.

As a member of Affluence.org you will have the ability to find and interact with other affluent people from around the world, evaluate and contribute to your favorite charities, and gain access to exclusive lifestyle guides to luxury living, travel and the latest trends.Within this elite community you will be provided with access to a dedicated Affluence Concierge, receive priority access to the world's most exclusive premieres, nightclubs, parties, hotels, events and much more.

To accept the invitation to our exclusive network, please follow the link below.  XXXXXXXX.

Best Regards,

Affluence.org Administration

Offline Gmail: instant user report

I just installed it on my account, and the downloaded Google Gears app informed me that "based on my email volume" it would be storing 3 months worth of emails on my local hard drive. It wasn't clear from the notation if it would be doing that for each browser I access gmail from. There was no option or information (even on the help page) to choose how far back it cached emails on my computer, nor any info on if it would constantly update to clean messages older than three months from the cache. It did note however, that any message in my Inbox, no matter how old would be cached, and that spam and items in the trash would not be cached.

Big news on the personal tech front (assuming it works)

One small step for transparency

Security theater: now in improved, online version (updated x2)

Trouble in the software business: this time, it's serious!

If you write me from EarthLink, here's why I won't write back

Continue reading "If you write me from EarthLink, here's why I won't write back" »

Last words on NYT.com block in China

What's curious to me - in fact, what's astounding to me - is that the Chinese authorities either haven't picked up on this phenomenon, or they don't care. Instead, they are doing what Chinese officials always do: focusing their attention on the entity with the most prestige. Quite honestly, I think most Chinese officials would have a hard time believing that the rather rag-tag unwashed mass of (for the most part) young, male, poorly compensated bloggers could actually drive news coverage.

NYTimes.com in China: Sunday morning update

Tech followups on NYTimes.com blockage in China (updated)

I suspect that while the reason behind this blocking is not yet clear,  the process--and thereby the motivation--might be a bit less obscure. That is, given that consensus drives policy decisions here, it is very likely that different parts of the bureaucracy weighed in and officials each had a gripe with the NYT coverage of some or another issue.  Collectively, they were able to push through a directive to block it.

The people here overseeing foreign journalists also know that there will soon be a new contingent manning the desks of the NYT bureau here.  Those officials want to send a clear signal that they expect more positive ("objective") coverage of China.

Continue reading "Tech followups on NYTimes.com blockage in China (updated)" »

Poll results are: NYTimes.com is being blocked throughout China (updated)

• Is the site blocked because of this big story today by Jim Yardley, about the economic perils China faces after 30 years of growth? Maybe .... but I have heard far worse prospects routinely discussed here at conferences, on Chinese TV shows, and by Chinese government officials in recent weeks. So that doesn't seem to make sense.
  
  
• Is it blocked because of this story, by Edward Wong, reporting on the death sentences issued for two Uighurs convicted of killing 17 people in an attack on a police/military station in the far nothwestern town of Kashgar just before the Olympics? This could well be the problem. The threat of separatism in the mainly-Muslim northwestern Xinjiang region is an extremely sensitive topic in China. As Wong points out, his story carries several details of the action that differ from official Chinese government accounts.
  
  
• Or is it blocked because of this unbelievably fatuous passage in yesterday's column by David Brooks: "Chinese people work hard because they grew up in a culture built around rice farming. Tending a rice paddy required working up to 3,000 hours a year, and it left a cultural legacy that prizes industriousness." Yes, culture matters; and yes, the structure of Chinese education, family patterns, and still-dominant agricultural life makes a difference in how people behave (not to mention the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, the years under Mao, the one-child policy, and so on). But to write something like that with a straight face suggests that one has never seen actual Chinese people at work (or ostentatiously not working) or thought about how many factors account for the wild variations in work ethic, purposefulness, scholastic aptitude, basic honesty, devotion to duty, etc among people who all supposedly share the rice paddy legacy. I would give some credit to the Chinese firewall minders if exasperation with this sort of talk were the reason for the shutdown. In fairness to Brooks, in the column he might have just been paraphrasing an argument by Malcolm Gladwell.
  
  
• Or is it being blocked for some other reason?
  

Another very impressive Obama pick

One might wonder from the array of interests of mine that have just been mentioned, whether I simply have a short attention span, but I do like to think that there is some method in this madness. I think that many, if not most, of the great problems of the human predicament - population, resources, environment, prosperity, security - are not separate problems, but are intimately interconnected. And I believe if they're not all addressed and solved together, they won't be solved at all.

Continue reading "Another very impressive Obama pick" »

Poll among readers in China: is NYTimes.com now blocked?

My last words on the Steven Chu front

More on the case for Steven Chu at energy

Continue reading "More on the case for Steven Chu at energy" »

Updates on "Forgetting? Fuhgeddaboudit"

In the 1990's, a research shop funded by Paul Allen worked on a number of the IBM projects described in their press release.  Specifically, the "memory" idea was put into practice by a researcher who strapped a video and audio recorder to his body, and recorded his daily rounds for weeks.  He attempted to capture 360 degree audio and video.  The point was to never miss anything that happened in your day, such as important conversations, your child's first steps, etc.

What happened instead is that no one wanted to speak with him.  We assume in conversation that what we say will not be recorded and played back directly (if we are not politicians, of course).  If all social interaction was assumed recorded, as opposed to the opposite, our shared world becomes something very different.  It was creepy. 

There were a number of other projects toying with social connectedness and interaction -- virtual offices and researchers connected through "surround sound" for example.  Again, something important about our assumptions of social interaction were broken.  We assume all work happens when groups are connected, but of course, we are private beings as well.

Continue reading "Updates on "Forgetting? Fuhgeddaboudit" " »

Quasi-nerds only: interesting little compare and contrast

Forgetting will become a distant memory
Information overload keeping you up at night? Forget about it. In the next five years, it will become much easier to remember what to buy at the grocery store, which errands need to be run, who you spoke with at a conference, where and when you agreed to meet a friend, or what product you saw advertised at the airport. That's because such details of everyday life will be recorded, stored, analyzed, and provided at the appropriate time and place by both portable and stationary smart appliances. To help make this possible, microphones and video cameras will record conversations and activities. The information collected will be automatically stored and analyzed on a personal computer. People can then be prompted to "remember" what discussions they had, for example, with their daughter or doctor by telephone. Based on such conversations, smart phones equipped with global-positioning technology might also remind them to pick up groceries or prescriptions if they pass a particular store at a particular time. It's not hard to imagine that TVs, remote controls, or even coffee table tops, can one day be the familiar mediums through which we tap into our digitally-stored information.

Somewhat encouraging environmental report

Can lower energy consumption come about in the United States? It already has. Per-capita energy use in California, about half the national average, has stayed flat for the past 30 years, largely through an ambitious program of appliance standards and other innovations in building design....

The report points out that the enhanced funding need only match federal energy research levels in place in 1980. Research around that time led to a major improvement in efficiency standards. For instance, compact fluorescent lights and refrigerators now use about one-fourth the energy needed for comparable models of 30 years ago. Air conditioners are twice as efficient as those in 1980. Such dramatic improvements in energy use could be sustained, many experts argue, but only if a concerted energy research program is put in place.

Why didn't I know this before? (Math dept: Benford's law)

Continue reading "Why didn't I know this before? (Math dept: Benford's law)" »

Realms converge: DayJet, VMware. Weird!

There are some interesting clues as to why Maritz and others in the technology industry are excited about DayJet.

Georgia Tech professor George Nemhauser, who helped develop DayJet's technology, said via phone that the system could help airlines, trucking firms and other transportation companies plan more-efficient routes between locations. Or, he said, it could be used by government agencies to plan evacuation routes during public emergencies. The original promise of the DayJet airline, he said, was to allow travelers to book flights when they wanted them rather than relying on an airline's set schedule.

"The whole idea is disruption technology," said Nemhauser. "You get a plan for something, and then a disruption occurs -- weather or something else -- and you have to make a new plan very quickly."

A fascinating document about the internet and "public opinion" in China

1. A bad thing happens somewhere in China (such as police brutality, government malfeasance, a forced eviction, a coal mine disaster, etc).

2. The local government suppresses all information.

3. All media reports are censored.  (But if it wasn't reported in traditional media, there are other alternatives now on the Internet.)

4. The victims begin a petitioning process up the hierarchy in order to seek justice.  The road is long and hard, and nothing ever comes out of it.

5. The Internet forums/blogs rushed to report on the case.  But within approximately 48 hours, all traces of information are erased by order of the authorities.  (Thus, one of the excitements of my blogging activity was to find and translate that information within this time window.)

6. Western media catch wind of the incident, and follow through.  This creates an international scandal.

7. Senior Chinese officials take notice, and corrective actions are taken.

Continue reading "A fascinating document about the internet and "public opinion" in China" »

This hardly seems sporting

More on the lean times / VC / startup front

Continue reading "More on the lean times / VC / startup front" »

Sobering news dept: The Hobbesian world of startups

I've been awash in reports, some in the press, some from friends, of private equity investors leaning on the companies in which they have stakes to reprice those stakes- to give the investors more.  The arguments from one case to the next are idiosyncratically different in their details, but they all have the same general thrust:  "we made our investments expecting more growth than it now seems likely the company will achieve, so you (the company) should give us a bigger stake."...

The issue is in no way misrepresentation... The issue that called the question was.. the sudden dramatic downturn in the economy:  credit is tight; anxiety is high; spending has dropped like a rock...  a situation triggered- and to some extent at least, abetted, if not indeed caused- by the excesses of the very financial firms now doing the demanding.

I've been around long enough to have gone through several busts; I've learned that many (if not most) investors understand opportunism to be not just their right, but their obligation.  (And indeed, I've seen some forms of opportunism contribute powerfully to turn-arounds.)  But I've never seen opportunism practiced in such a rapacious way as these recent days- nor, I'd suggest, so desperately nor short-sightedly selfishly....

It's a situation all too resonant with the first version of the Paulson Bail-out Plan: privatize the upside; socialize the risk.

The whole thing is worth reading, and is another illustration of the ways in which the recent  financial turmoil, serious enough on its own, is taking on a more destructive and longer-lasting form as it begins to burden the operations of the "real" economy.

I don't quite believe this, but... (USB finale+1)

USB: Finale

Continue reading "USB: Finale " »

Non-politics: David Allen's 'GTD Times'

The little USB stick...

Nerds-with-a-heart only: the passion of the USB

Non-politics, non-depressing: nice software updates

More on the Sequoia Capital presentation

Continue reading "More on the Sequoia Capital presentation" »

This is impressive, and yet sort of sad (USB immortality dept)

Very sobering report from Silicon Valley

One time only: Java-Javascript smackdown

Continue reading "One time only: Java-Javascript smackdown" »

Non-political: more on Google Chrome

As will surprise no one who follows the technology press, we still cannot recommend Windows Vista. If you're using Windows XP, we'd advise you not to upgrade to Vista, and buyers of new computers should consider having XP installed, which is an option many manufacturers still offer.

Continue reading "Non-political: more on Google Chrome" »

Immortality update (USB department)

New hope for the dead (USB dept.)

In which I reveal myself as Marie Antoinette (VPN dept)

An expat in China [me!] thinks: that's a little over a dime a day. A Chinese factory worker thinks: [$40] is a week's take-home pay. Even for a young academic, it's a couple days' work.

Continue reading "In which I reveal myself as Marie Antoinette (VPN dept)" »

Non-politics: Google Chrome, first in a series (updated)

Continue reading "Non-politics: Google Chrome, first in a series (updated)" »

How to avoid becoming a Kindle nerd-bore

Continue reading "How to avoid becoming a Kindle nerd-bore" »

On the ages of the female Chinese gymnasts

Nerdy nerds only: Version 1.0 of Chandler officially released

• Some of the earliest Paleolithic rumblings here, in the second half of an Atlantic article written in early 1996. The first half of the article describes the wacky new concept behind a approach to software called "Java," and gives quotes on that subject from a promising engineer at Sun named Eric Schmidt.
  
  
• Another installment here, from eleven years ago, which gave the tragic history of Lotus's too-innovative Agenda program -- and the still-live ambitions of its sponsor, Mitch Kapor, to create the info-management program of everyone's dreams.
  
  
• Two years ago, this update on how Kapor was faring now that he had named this dream program "Chandler" and moved its development to the Open Source Application Foundation, which he initially funded. And late last year, this interim report on how an early version of Chandler looked and worked. And let's not forget Scott Rosenberg's very good book about the whole Chandler project, Dreaming in Code.

Continue reading "Nerdy nerds only: Version 1.0 of Chandler officially released" »

Nerds only: very impressive new beta of VMware Fusion

Continue reading "Nerds only: very impressive new beta of VMware Fusion" »

Trouble in paradise: VMware Fusion + MBAir + Firefox

Newbie Kindle reactions (cont)

I'll try not to become a nerd-bore on this topic too, but: Kindle

Two sophisticated and well-worth-reading documents on national security

Dead men walking, USB-stick variety

"In the midst of life we are in death," as the Book of Common Prayer puts it. Every faith has a way of conveying the same idea.

The technology world's version is the sad recognition that any device starts becoming obsolete the instant you buy it. But there perhaps should be a specific line or verse referring to USB sticks. I mentioned recently that one of mine (a PNY Optima Attache model) had survived a trip through the washer and dryer and still worked fine. Reader Gary Allen Vollink brings the unsurprising but sobering news that all is transience even with the hard silicon of USBs:

The corrosion starts once they get wet. There's no stopping it. It will die suddenly and unexpectedly. It will probably take between 4 and 8 weeks.

Sadly, I've done this with THREE already, and one of them was also an Attache. They all reacted - pretty much the same way.

That is -- back up your backup.

Book of Common Prayer: "Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower." Tech world: "Back up your backup." It comes to the same thing.

Update: this does nothing about the human "in the midst of life" problem, but reader Matthew Wilbert reminds me that soaking the USB stick in WD-40 can do wonders against corrosion. "That's (more or less) why it was invented." FWIW.

Endurance champ (flyweight division)

Yesterday I mentioned that because I couldn't find a USB stick, I had rigged up a clumsy ad hoc network just to transfer one file.

It turns out that the USB stick wasn't actually lost. It was.... only resting, deep in a pocket of some pants that had gone into the wash. The pants have now come out of the wash -- in specific, a trip through the washing machine and the dryer, though not the ironing board. Of course only after all that was the USB stick discovered.

With a sense of doom, I tried it -- and it still works fine! All the files that were on there before are on there now, and perfectly readable. I just used it to make another file transfer: no problem. It even passes the performance tests for "ReadyBoost" service as temporary RAM under Vista.

So if you're looking for the USB stick that, in the words of the ancient Timex slogan, takes a licking and keeps on ticking, I say: look no further than the PNY Optima Attache 8GB model. This genuinely surprises me. And think of the seconds you'll save not having to empty your pockets.

PS the reddish background in the picture above is not some lush grosgrain but the back cover of Bowl of Cherries, a racy recent comic novel about teenaged lusts, the war in Iraq, modern college life, etc. It is the first novel from Millard Kaufman, who was born in 1917. He is said to be at work on his second. Endurance champ of a different sort.

Catching up quickly UPDATED & CORRECTED!

Clamboring toward and through the airport for the long flight "home" to Beijing -- whose own airport has the delightfully old-school identifier PEK -- two items leap out at me from quick exposure to headlines of the past week.

1) The Chinese government has closed down Time Out Beijing. (According to the Times of London, via Paul Karl Lukas.)

Response from Mozilla on a rumored security concern

A few days ago I got a note from a technically-minded friend who also has worked in the military/security field. He wrote with a warning about a problem with the newly-released official version of Firefox 3.

He said, “Browsing history can no longer be readily cleared upon exit as with previous versions (like release 2). It is now stored in an encrypted file that, any turkey with half a brain, can readily decrypt, or if they have physical access / web access to your machine, can download / copy at will.” This person travels frequently in China and said he considered this too serious a risk if he had to leave his machine unattended. “I think this is not the browser that I would want to travel around many places and work with.”

Worse, he said, when he went back to Mozilla to find the Firefox 2 install files so he could return to a system he found more comfortable, the files were no longer there.

I was about to post his comments and say that while this person was more security-conscious than I was, the point was worth knowing about in illustrating how much more digital information about ourselves we leave at every turn. Then I thought: why not ask Mozilla?

It turns out that, according to Mozilla, these concerns are unfounded. I heard back quickly from John Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO, and Mike Beltzner, the program lead for FF3, about where these apparently-missing features could be found. If anyone has harbored concerns like my friend’s, responses (tied to this screenshot) come after the jump.

______

Continue reading "Response from Mozilla on a rumored security concern" »

Update on The Ribbon

It appears that I am indeed the last person in the world to figure out how to conceal the large Ribbon at the top of Office2007 apps -- Word, Excel, etc. Good to find this out! And extra tips:

1) Ctl-F1 is the easiest way to get the job done, toggling the Ribbon on and off;

2) Double-clicking on one of the headings at the top of the screen "View," "Insert" etc also works as a toggle. This I knew.

3) Something I didn't know, and that is quite elegant for the keyboard-centric like me. If you have minimized the Ribbon, you can then hold down the Alt key -- and guides to the keyboard shortcuts for various commands appear. (Actually, this Alt-key trick works if the Ribbon is full-sized too.) There are many of us who have spent years learning the sequence of keys to get a job done without going to the mouse. Most of them still work, and this Alt-key trick provides clues. Picture below shows effect of Alt key with normal sized Ribbon -- for instance, Alt-A-L to align copy to the left.

Thanks to Erik Love, Steve Endow, and a cast of thousands.

How did I go so long without knowing this? (First in a million-part series)

Microsoft's two big releases of 2007 were Vista and Office2007. At least I liked one of them! The new Office07 products -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc -- have a number of small refinements that I appreciate. They look much nicer than their predecessors, at least to my eye, and they're technically improved, including with a new file format that takes only half the storage space of previous versions. Some of the commands are annoyingly different from the ones my fingers had been used to for years. But, conveniently, in most cases the programs will still recognize what you're trying to do if you hit the old sequence of keys.

What I don't like is "The Ribbon." This is the big banner at the top of each Word, Excel, etc display that takes up an awful lot of screen space with its new menu of commands.

Two reasons I object to The Ribbon: it's big, intrusive, and busy, getting in the way of the actual material I'm supposed to be thinking about. And, it reflects the same questionable design trade-off as Microsoft's previous and dreaded Clippy feature -- "You seem to be writing a letter!", that Clippy. These quasi-tutorial aids are possibly useful the very first time or two or ten you use the program and are still figuring it out. The next million times you use it, after you've learned how it works, these "assistants" just get in the way. Or, again, that's how Clippy and The Ribbon are for me.

Am I the last person on earth to figure out that you can make The Ribbon go away in Office 2007 programs? It is easy, though underpublicized. I came across it by accidental keystroke. You right-click at the top of the screen, in the command bar or the big fat Ribbon zone; you chose "Minimize the Ribbon," and it is gone! Five or six more usable lines of screen real-estate immediately come into view. (Depends on the specific program, font size and zoom factor, etc.) And if you need to see ribbon commands at any point, you just click on "View" at the top of the screen and it toggles on and off.

If anyone else had been in the dark: well, now, let there be light.

For nerds and Sinologists alike: the Firefox 3 snarl

As mentioned two days ago, the Mozilla organization, creator of Firefox, has been trying to gin up a world-wide effort to get as many people as possible to download the official version of Firefox 3 on its release day, June 17. And if users around the world hit the servers all at once, they could set a Guinness World Record for most downloads in a 24-hour span. Great!

So of course when the fun began about 12 hours ago, as the release files went up and users everywhere logged in -- the Mozilla servers promptly froze and crashed.

Let's see. You're a leading internet company, and you're drumming up action from all around the world for what you hope will be a simultaneous assault on your servers, maybe you should be prepared for... a huge surge in traffic?? Just a thought.

And, hmmm, why does this make me think of the Olympics?

Continue reading "For nerds and Sinologists alike: the Firefox 3 snarl" »

Nerds only: Firefox Download Day

This is fundamentally silly -- people pledging online to set a world record for software downloads in a single day. Fortunately, the software in question, the official release of Firefox 3, is highly worthwhile. Beta and Release Candidates have been available for several months and are great. Download day for the official version is this coming Tuesday. Windows, Mac, Linux.

The Download Day Map lets you say where you'll be when you download. If I'd thought about it, before answering honestly (China) I would have chosen some place where I've actually been but that is underrepresented in the count -- say, the Falkland Islands or Liberia. Not that I'm in favor of giving misleading answers to polls. The map of pledged downloads actually is quite interesting: as of now, 263 Firefox users are (reportedly) signed up from North Korea!

Mac nerds only: becoming a believer on the battery front

I mentioned earlier that I was using a pricey (~$300) battery extender, from QuickerTek, to make up for one of the MacBook Air's biggest limitations: that you can't swap its battery out. The device in question is the square thing on the left in the photo below. And, yes, that's the Windows XP welcome screen, running very nicely on the Mac under VMware Fusion. If you squint, you can even see the icons for Zoot and Brainstorm, my trusty PC programs. Outlook and X1 are in there too.

Latest data point: during travel yesterday I used the MB Air away from an electric plug, but with this battery extender, for ten straight hours and was nowhere close to using up the power. Details after the jump, but my experience is: for a price, this is a way to eliminate all questions about whether you can get enough working time out of the MBA.

Continue reading "Mac nerds only: becoming a believer on the battery front" »

Not about politics! More on file-sync

I mentioned yesterday that I was trying, and liking, the (blush) "Magic Briefcase" feature of the program SugarSync. It's an easy way to work on the same set of files, on different computers, and always have the current version on hand wherever you work.

As one, the blog-reading public has risen up to remind me that in any discussion of sync programs, it's important to include a familiar contender, Microsoft's FolderShare, which I have used in the past and will try again; and a newer (to me) entrant, AutoSync from Memeo.

I will give them both a try and report results. What are computers for, if not to fritter*? In the meantime, be advised of these sync possibilities too.
________
* My friend Stephen Manes, novelist and tech writer, has lifetime copyright to the term "fritterware" to describe activity of this sort.

While waiting for political news, three nice things to say

1) If you're looking for a file-sync program it's worth checking out the widely-praised SugarSync. The name gives me the creeps, and I'm almost embarrassed to use its "Magic Briefcase" feature. But these people have figured out something important: an easy way to keep files synchronized among a bunch of computers.

I actually do use three computers almost interchangeably: a ThinkPad PC laptop, a MacAir notebook, and a MacMini desktop. I always taking notes or checking off items on files I want to keep current among all the machines. (Word files; Excel files; my oddball Zoot and Brainstorm files; and others.) I've generally transferred these from machine to machine with a USB stick, or emailed them back and forth. Overall, this is a pain, plus it can be hard to remember which file on which machine is the current version. With the "magic briefcase" feature, which I won't explain, changes in the files on one machine are instantly available on all the others.

SugarSync is initially available on free trial and then costs about $30 a year, which I'll probably pay. It makes me reflect on how computer spending has changed. I very rarely spend money for actual software any more. But I'm paying more and more for services -- $40 a year for a VPN, $25 or so for photo storage, $40 or so for online backup service, more than I want to think for internet service and international cell phone and data service, and about ten others I can't think of now. I guess I'll think of it as part of the evolution toward a "service" economy.

2) Beijing guidebooks -- this is the one to get:

Continue reading "While waiting for political news, three nice things to say" »

Nerds only: new Outlook indexer "Lookeen"

As mentioned earlier, I have twice installed and twice removed versions of the much-touted Outlook indexer Xobni. In theory Xobni was great; in practice, for me, it was no good because it gobbled so much of my computer's memory and CPU that it paralyzed everything else on the machine. Details in previous posts.

Through controlled experiment I think I've established that my Xobni problem is a "scale" issue. I've tried it on a computer with only a few hundred emails to index; it worked like magic. On my real computer, with tens of thousands of emails in Outlook .PST files spanning the last decade, it broke down. (In its current version, Xobni does not allow you to choose which .PSTs you want it to handle; it tackles everything it finds. I understand that this may change -- and that other speed and scaling improvements are on their way.) This would explain why some people who've written in are so happy with it -- they don't have that many stored emails -- while others share my exact complaint.

An alternative to check out: the non-touted Lookeen, from a tiny little firm in Germany. The searches it runs are extremely fast, and it imposes no detectable burden on the computer's overall speed. It lets you choose which .PST files you want to include or omit -- though you might as well include everything, since it seems to handle a > 100,000-item index about as fast as a small one. Fourteen-day free trial available; after that, $39.80. Worth a look -- as is, of course, the long-time champ of very fast, very scalable PC search engines, X1.

(For those joining us late: the reason to bother with any of these is that the built-in Outlook search system is so clumsy and slow.)

The next three points about MacBook Air

As promised recently, the ongoing MacAir report will unfold in compact, digestible three-point installments. (Index to previous installments here.) Today's three points:

1) Is the MacAir suitable as your "real" computer? No.

OK: that's a spoiled-sounding thing to say. What I mean is that this machine is optimized for ease, convenience, and elegance as a portable computer, at the expense of features that would make it better for day-in, day-out stuck at the office use.

Most obvious illustration: this is one of the very few modern computers with no CD/DVD drive at all. (Unlike its closest PC counterpart, the new Lenovo ThinkPad X300.) You can work around that with a convenient utility to read from another machine's DVD drive, over a network -- but that means you have to have another machine. Similarly: you can work around the absence of an Ethernet port (with a separate dongle), and the presence of only one USB port, and the absence of a microphone jack. But they are workarounds, and there is no getting around the limit on the hard drive, which holds a maximum of 80GB. Not a huge amount, by today's desktop computer standards.

The MacAir remains elegant and beautiful; it has stood up well to travel (protected by this neoprene sleeve); I have no complaints about fit or finish or any other mechanical feature. But just as some resort properties are suitable mainly for those who can consider them "second homes," this is suitable mainly for people who can consider it a second computer. Though a nice one....

2) What about that battery life?

Continue reading "The next three points about MacBook Air" »

More on Cisco and the Great Firewall

Via Wired.com two days ago, an astonishing and apparently legit internal document from Cisco back in 2002, when it was preparing to sell the Chinese government the routers that were initially necessary to make the "Great Firewall" system of internet censorship work. (My Atlantic article on how the Firewall works here; also, followup interviews with Network World and TheAtlantic.com. For the record, the official name for the firewall and related systems is not the Great Firewall but the "Golden Shield" project.)

The "To Be Sure" section:
- Cisco has always claimed, and this document supports, that it didn't tailor any of its products particularly to the Chinese government's needs. Its normal product just happened to be what the government wanted;

- Whatever Cisco did or did not do six years ago, China no longer needs any outsider's help to make the system go. As I point out in my article, China's own companies, notably Huawei, can provide everything the government requires;

- There was never very much money involved. (According to Wired, $100,000 - could it really have been so little???);

- A Cisco official told Wired that he was "appalled" and "disappointed" at what the document showed.

Still: pages 48-58 of this PDF presentation seem to remove any doubt that Cisco knew, at the time, exactly what China had in mind with the "Golden Shield" program -- and viewed it as a great business opportunity.

Technology, not politics

Andrew Sullivan asks in his blog a question several readers have asked me (as well as him) directly: Why is his part of the Atlantic blog empire blocked by the Great Firewall of China, while the rest of the Atlantic's site, archives, photos, comments, etc is not?

I love the idea that discerning Communist cadres in Beijing have pored over and parsed everything in the magazine and determined that Andrew's posts are in some basic way more threatening to the regime's long-term legitimacy -- they're betting on Hillary? -- than anything else the magazine serves up. Alas, there's a prosaic and purely mechanical explanation.

For legacy reasons -- ie, his long pre-Atlantic blog existence -- Andrew's blog is hosted on an different system from everything else displayed on TheAtlantic.com. The system Andrew uses is one of several that are subject to blanket black-outs by the Great Firewall; the one that hosts the rest of the magazine is not. Andrew, come join us on the new system! Andrew's aspiring readers in China: try a VPN!

I think of the following episode when considering the how and why of Chinese press-control policy: A few months ago I ran into a man who was operating a fairly daring museum, which had many relics from the Cultural Revolution. I asked him whether the government was giving him trouble. "The government is busy," he said. Saves time just to turn whole web domains on and off.

My three computers (MacBook Air saga, cont..)

Three months into my use and ownership of both a MacBook Air and a Mac Mini, and nearly 30 years into my use and ownership of computers in the CP/M -> DOS -> Windows lineage, I keep waiting for the moment to give a "complete" and panoramic view of the pluses and minuses of each approach.

That moment will never come. So I will resume the piecemeal descriptions offered before (here and in previous installments).

For reference: my three-working-computer setup here at Beijing HQ, in a posed but not entirely unrepresentative configuration. On the left: venerable Thinkpad T60 running Vista and a zillion Windows-style programs. On the right: the MacBook Air in all its svelteness. In between, a Mac Mini, connected to a big flat-panel display and a Mac-style aluminum keyboard.

I still use all of them, through day by day the trend is, ratchet-like, in the Mac direction. I wouldn't be embarrassed to have a multi-system life for quite a while ahead, since each has its strengths --and since I don't regard this as a religious or cultural all-or-nothing decision. As soon as I even think about trying to present the ins and outs of each system, I get nervous about what a long chore that would be. (Also, I know that David Alison's excellent blog has over the last few months chronicled in exquisite detail every shift, surprise, irritation, how-to, and satisfaction he has gone through during his switch to the Mac.)

So I'll make this manageable by doling out three or four points per post, which cumulatively may someday represent the complete Mac/PC almanac so many people dream of.

Today's three points:

Continue reading "My three computers (MacBook Air saga, cont..)" »

Great Firewall slideshow

Yesterday I mentioned that Network World had run a Q&A (with me) about how the Great Firewall of China does and doesn't work. Just now they've put up a nice conceptual slide show on "How the Chinese Internet is Different from Yours," here. Worth a look, and includes at least one thing I didn't know before.

Interview about Great Firewall in Network World

In the new issue of the tech journal Network World, I have this Q-and-A, with Carolyn Duffy Marsan, about the workings, weaknesses, and evolution of China's "Great Firewall," expanding on this article in the Atlantic two months back.

New, "official" GTD blog site

Two or three years ago, David Allen, father of the "Getting Things Done"/GTD approach to life, started a personal blog. He kept it up for a couple of months and then, no doubt realizing that this kind of daily fritter was at odds with his larger message about sensible use of your time, put it to sleep. (My 2004 Atlantic article about David Allen here; recent item about GTD-type software here.)

In the absence of blog-world messages from The Man himself, many other GTD-related blogs have continued to spring up. That's all to the good -- but a few weeks ago Allen and his team launched their own blog, straight from GTD Central. It is called GTDTimes and is worth checking out.

Nerds only: pulling the plug on Xobni

I mentioned two days ago that I'd liked the idea of the spiffy Outlook-indexer Xobni, but that when I'd tried a beta version in January it had slowed my PC to a point of paralysis.

The new release has been getting a lot of buzz, so I thought I'd try it again.

No dice. After two days of torpor I have just taken it off the machine. Made the already-glacial startup process of Outlook (under Vista) almost interminable. Used so many CPUs and -- especially -- so much memory that the computer wasn't good for anything else. Could just be me. Could just be my computer. Could be the evil Vista (on the computer where I installed Xobni). Could be entirely different for you. Just reporting my experience.

And maybe it's not just me. When you uninstall Xobni, it asks you why. The choices:

"Please tell us why you uninstalled so we can improve:
" 1. I wasn't using it.
" 2. It used too many computer resources
" 3. Outlook froze during normal operation
" 4. It made Outlook startup too slow.
" 5. Sidebar disappeared or stopped loading
" 6. It slowed down my Outlook.
" 7. I just temporarily uninstalled and will reinstall.
" 8. It did not index my mail properly
" 9. Outlook crashed"

I checked 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9. But when they have a new version...

Nerds only: Giving Xobni another try (Updated)

Back in January I tried the beta version of Xobni*-- a new system for indexing and arraying your email within Outlook that is now getting a lot of attention, thanks to a rave in the NYT yesterday. (Or, "this morning," US time.)

In the beta version, I found it so incredibly CPU-intensive and greedy for system resources that it brought my PC (ThinkPad T60, 2Gb RAM, 4GB "ReadyBoost" RAM supplement) nearly to a halt. True, this ThinkPad was running the hated Windows Vista at the time, so it was looking for any excuse to halt. And true, I was asking it to index many GBs worth of old Outlook .PST files. But I unloaded Xobni, thinking: wouldn't it be nice if this actually worked.

Several friends say that the new version works better. We'll see. And this note is also a teaser for the omnibus, final MacAir / MacMini / ThinkPad compare-and-contrast exercise later this week.

UPDATE: Xobni still breaks my T60 laptop. Consumes so many CPU cycles and memory that everything else stops. Will un-install, reinstall, and try one more time.

* Xobni's name has the same etymology as that of Shanghai's beloved local beer, REEB. Reeb is of course "beer" spelled backward, and...

Real-time report: Olympic ticket-ordering system

There are various ways in which China will be tested to see if it is "ready" to host the Olympics. For instance:
- buildings, venues, stadiums -- these are well underway, they look impressive from the outside, and everyone seems to assume they'll be great;
- physical infrastructure: the new terminal at Beijing's airport has just opened, countless subway stops are scheduled to open in time for the games, I would imagine that this has been well-planned and will work out;
- social infrastructure: posters appear every day reminding people to spit less, stand in line more, be gracious hosts, etc. There's a big push that seems to have a willing spirit behind it. Over the months I have encountered exactly one Beijing taxi driver who knew more English than I know Chinese, but a big effort in teaching taxicab English is reportedly underway. And all subway lines have signs and announcements in English as well as Chinese.
- natural environment: here's hoping!

Then there is the general and hard-to-pin down question of simply handling the Olympic-scale volume -- for traffic, crowd control, whatever. One proxy is the system for ordering Olympic tickets. Residents of China (foreign and Chinese) had their third opportunity to order tickets starting at 9am China time today -- 45 minutes ago as I write. My wife and I are trying to order some tickets to the rowing events, where (a) huge numbers of tickets are available, and (b) we have some friends involved in the competition. After the jump, a real-time chronicle of how it's going.

(Update: summary of chronicle below is that two and a half hours after the experiment began, the transaction failed and the web site invited me to try again from the start. Five hours after that, at the end of its first business day of operation, the system still wasn't working. Obviously the ticket system is overwhelmed by the volume of traffic coming at it all at once. But that brings us back to the original question about being ready to handle the predictably huge, surge-style peaks of Olympic-related volume. We'll see...)

Extra-final update: Success! At 6:45pm China time, only nine hours and forty-five minutes after first logging on, I landed three bargain seats for the rowing heats, @ 20RMB ($2.85 -- the 30RMB seats must have been sold out). End of the chronicle.
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Continue reading "Real-time report: Olympic ticket-ordering system" »

Shorter version of preceding "Outlook flaw" post

Based on all available feedback, the problem is not that I'm missing some tweak or setting in Outlook. It's that the program has a basic design flaw in the way it handles "all day events" -- for instance, St. Patrick's Day occurring on March 17.

Apparently Outlook provides no way to assign that event to the entire day itself. It is designed to assign it to a 24-hour span, so whenever you change time zones, you're screwed. The 24 hours that had run midnight-to-midnight now go 3am-to-3am. This is a design decision worthy of Clippy in its user-unfriendliness.

Oh well. Now at least I know. But please, Microsoft folk, can't you do better than this?

UPDATE: Here's what is really objectionable about Outlook's approach. The system's display suggests that there IS a difference between an "all-day appointment," like St. Patrick's Day being on March 17, and a 24-hour appointment running, say, 1am to 1am. The all-day event displays as a single line on your calendar; the 24-hour appointment spreads across every one of the hours included. But in their underlying architecture, it appears that there is no difference at all. An "all-day" event is just another 24-hour span, which happens to display as a single line if you're in the same time zone you were when you created it. To the best of my knowledge, this is different from how, for instance, Google Calendar handles the issue: GC treats "all-day" events as conceptually separate from other 24-hour appointments. The Outlook design decision seems unwise to me, because of the frustrations it creates. But its display decision goes beyond being unwise to being outright deceptive, since it suggests a distinction that the program itself does not support. (It would be as if Word, in certain conditions, displayed a passage in italics, when really the words were all stored as plain text.) Can't someone on the Office team do better than this?

Nerds only: There has to be a fix for this flaw in Outlook, right???? (Updated)

Here is something that has driven me crazy about Outlook for the ten-plus years I've used it. I can't really believe it's insoluble, because that would mean that the program has a more glaringly troublesome defect than others we know about. But I haven't found the solution -- and I'll offer the traditional bonus of a year's subscription to the Atlantic to the first person who can tell me the answer, which I'll share. (Sincerity alert: these are actual paid-out-of-my-pocket bonuses, not company freebies.)

The problem involves Outlook's handling of time zones.

Continue reading "Nerds only: There has to be a fix for this flaw in Outlook, right???? (Updated)" »

Bright side #5: interesting GTD software, including for Mac

I am a long-standing devotee of the David Allen "Getting Things Done" (GTD) approach to life, as I first described in this Atlantic article about him four years ago. We've become friends and stayed in touch since then too, which at least for me has been very enjoyable. Plus, since long before the Atlantic wrote about him he has been a loyal subscriber!

The GTD Way mainly involves habits of mind and action, but it also places a lot of emphasis on having the right tools, gizmos, and gimmicks to support those habits. Over the years I've used a variety of software to set up GTD-based systems on my computer. Ones I've liked include Results Manager and Chandler. The one I keep coming back to for my own purposes, more than a dozen years after I started using it, is the idiosyncratic but powerful Zoot. Zoot is PC-only, and for that matter text-only (no graphics etc), but it runs flawlessly on a Mac under VMWare Fusion.

Here are three more to bear in mind, with different strengths and idiosyncracies of their own:

Continue reading "Bright side #5: interesting GTD software, including for Mac" »

"Clippy" update -- now, with organizational anthropology!

As mentioned yesterday, my personal crusade during my 6-month spell as a Microsoft Word team member, waged from my stronghold in Building 17 on the main "campus" in Redmond, was an effort to get "Clippy" removed from Word and other programs.

There's an aspect to the struggle that suggests that big organizations anywhere share certain traits, whether their product is "national security" (the Pentagon), a "harmonious society" (the Chinese Communist Party), or "great software" (Microsoft). One such trait is the effort of people up and down a bureaucratic hierarchy to guess at what the boss would "really" like, and do that -- even if the boss has never said so, and even if it's might not be what the boss actually has in mind.

Continue reading ""Clippy" update -- now, with organizational anthropology!" »

Looking on the bright side #2: Offline Google Docs

As a reminder: The big plus of cloud computing is that you can get to your information from any computer any place, as long as you have an internet connection. The big minus is that you can't do much of anything if you're not on the internet. For instance: I conduct most of my email life through a variety of Gmail accounts. But unless I download and store the messages on Outlook (or Thunderbird or Mac Mail or something else), I can't read or answer them when I'm on a plane, visiting an office building, or generally wondering how I will ever dig out of the email hole I have created for myself in a month away from the computer.

Six weeks ago, Google introduced one useful tool for dealing with this "what about when I'm offline?" problem. This was an unobtrusive, elegant, and so far (for me) bulletproof way of keeping an online Google Calendar synchronized with a calendar file in Microsoft Outlook. I find this surprisingly useful. I can enter -- or change, or delete -- a datebook item either at my "real" computer, when using Outlook, or on the Google calendar if I'm using someone else's machine, in full confidence that the changes will ripple through all versions of my calendar information. Including the version I can get from any mobile phone via SMS if i send a text message asking for details on the next place I'm supposed to go or number I'm supposed to call.

Over the last four weeks, Google has been slowly rolling out another tool that potentially can make cloud-computing more usable. This is the "Offline" version of Google Docs, which in turn relies on a utility called Google Gears.

It works this way:

Continue reading "Looking on the bright side #2: Offline Google Docs" »

Recent items about Chinese info-control, #4

A new report from the Pew Internet Project indicates that most internet users in China accept the idea that material on web sites should be monitored and controlled -- and that the government should do the controlling. For instance:

Most readers of the Western press are aware of efforts by the Chinese government to control what its people can read and discuss online. Outside observers and human-rights groups monitor and criticize the government's actions and publicize the techniques through which technologically savvy Chinese internet users can work around restrictions. Some analysts also track and interpret the government's subtler shifts in balance that seek to encourage internet development while still exercising control over it...

[O]ther evidence suggests that many Chinese citizens do not share Western views of the internet. The survey findings discussed here, drawn from a broad-based sample of urban Chinese internet users and non-users alike, indicate a degree of comfort and even approval of the notion that the government authorities should control and manage the content available on the internet.

The report goes on to say that 84 percent of Chinese internet users felt content should be controlled, and about the same number approved of the government's doing so. It also explores some of the reasons behind an attitude that confounds many American expectations about what the spread of the internet "should" mean. The discussion is based on a nationwide survey funded by the Markle Foundation and conducted by a respected Chinese social scientist named Guo Liang. It is very much worth reading, in connection with ongoing stories about mainstream Chinese views of news from Tibet and of criticism on that and other subjects from overseas.

I've been interested in these same issues and explored some of them in a recent article on how the China's Great Firewall works. I should probably mention at this point that the China office of the Pew Internet Project is a little desk in our bedroom, about ten feet away from the Atlantic's China bureau, and that the author of this report, Deborah Fallows, is my wife.

Nerds only: Firefox 3 beta is available

A relatively stable and very attractive beta version of Firefox 3 has been around for a week or two. Windows, Mac, and Linux versions, in most languages you can think of, available free here.

It is a beta -- in fact, beta 4 -- so it has some rough edges. For me the main one is that some Firefox plug-ins I use all the time aren't yet compatible with this version. (Biggest stopper for me: Chinese Perapera-kun, for help reading Chinese characters on line.*) But it has a variety of tricks to make it run faster, and use less memory, than Firefox 2 does. Also, you can keep both 2 and 3 on your machine and use them alternately, though there can be slight start-up delays when you load one after using the other. I switch back to 2 only when I want to use that Chinese plug-in.

F3 B4 has many other nice functional and stylistic improvements, especially in managing downloads and bookmarks and in auto-completing addresses you have typed before. Hasn't crashed or hung for me on either a Mac or PC... yet. Take a look.

(*Update: This wonderful tip from Lifehacker explains how to get plug-ins like Perapera-kun to run under the new beta. It worked! As the Lifehacker post explains, this is in the realm of do-it-yourself surgery and not worth trying if you're squeamish. But it took less than a minute, and it means I can run this new beta version all the time now.)

Another step toward the online "cloud computing" life

Web-based computing has these advantages: It doesn't matter what kind of computer you use. Mac, Windows, Linux, Ubuntu -- they're all the same. It doesn't matter whose computer you're using, or where. You don't have to drag hard drives or USB sticks or even computers around with you, or copy files between a desktop and a laptop machine to keep them up to date. You just sit down wherever you get a web connection and dig in. Everything you need is stored in the internet "cloud."

(For the Atlantic's premonition of such cloud computing 12 years ago, check here, and after the jump.)

Web-based computing has a small disadvantage: working with an online program like, say, Writely (now Google Docs) is slower than using one based on your own machine, since info must constantly go back and forth from a remote server.

It also has a huge disadvantage: when you're off line, you're out of luck. You can't get at your web-based mail, you can't get at your online calendar or contact list or documents, you can't do very much. Traveling in China, I spend a lot of time off-line, so for me this is a deal-breaker.

All of which is why, to me, the news that Google Calendar will sync with Microsoft Outlook is big news indeed.

Continue reading "Another step toward the online "cloud computing" life" »

Tibet info-flow update

As of Saturday night, March 15, China time, in Beijing:

- The screen goes black on CNN one second after any report about the situation in Lhasa begins;

- Similar coverage on BBC World TV has, oddly, come through unmolested -- though BBC has often been blacked out in the past. This evening I saw footage on BBC of riots in Lhasa, cars being burned, accusations of attacks on monks, and so on;

- CCTV coverage (that's state-run China Central TV) has included at least one brief mention we saw, similar to those in the papers previously discussed here, saying that small groups of hooligans have attacked soldiers in Lhasa but that things are under control.

- Just about every blog, web site, or online news source I've tried for info about Tibet has been blocked by the Great Firewall, using one of the techniques I discussed in this article. The URLs for those sites -- say, NYTimes.com -- aren't permanently black-listed or blocked. But when the GFW's filtering system sees troublesome words in the actual content of the page you're reading -- and let's assume the words Tibet, Lhasa, and Dalai Lama now all qualify -- it breaks the connection and interrupts all attempts to go back to the site for certain period of time. So far, my VPN has gotten me around this barrier. But, as discussed in the article, avoiding the Great Firewall is enough of a chore and an expense that most Chinese citizens don't bother. I imagine some people in Tibet are bothering now.

Nerds only: new version of Zoot goes up

It was more than ten years ago that I first praised in print the quirky little info-management program called Zoot. Looking at that article from August, 1997 is a reminder of how much has changed since then -- it was written before the internet boom, before the internet bust, when the "new" operating systems were Windows95 and WindowsNT, when neither Google nor Web 2.0 nor the iPod had been heard of, and when Apple was at such a low ebb that it wasn't clear that the Macintosh as a PC-alternative would survive.

The one thing that has been constant in my computing life since then is that I have used this same little program to collect and organize information for everything I write. The program has been honed over those years by one Tom Davis -- a 31-year old lone programmer when I wrote about him, a still jaunty looking lone programmer now. (Before moving to China, I went to Boca Raton, Florida, near where he lives, and met him for the first time. Here he is at the Boca Raton airport, pointing at the Z, as in Zoot, on the tail of the Cirrus SR-20 that I owned then and had flown to Florida.)

Continue reading "Nerds only: new version of Zoot goes up" »

MacBook Air #5: the Air comes home

Beijing Metro line #1. Guomao station, March 6 2008. Illuminated sign roughly 3' x 8':

The MacBook Air, made in China (like virtually all other laptops and notebooks), comes back to its birthplace.

Two extra Air-related points:

Continue reading "MacBook Air #5: the Air comes home" »

Ah! Why didn't I think of that? (Chinese internet dept)

The internet these last few days in Beijing has been like molasses. Pages that take one minute or more to load. Many pages that time out, give up, and won't load at all. As I mention in my article on China's Great Firewall in the current issue of the Atlantic, one reason internet censorship is so effective in China is that you're never quite sure why you can't find the sites you're looking for:

Andrew Lih points out that other countries that also censor Internet content—Singapore, for instance, or the United Arab Emirates—provide explanations whenever they do so. Someone who clicks on a pornographic or “anti-Islamic” site in the U.A.E. gets the following message, in Arabic and English: “We apologize the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political, and moral values of the United Arab Emirates.” In China, the connection just times out. Is it your computer’s problem? The firewall? Or maybe your local Internet provider, which has decided to do some filtering on its own? You don’t know. “The unpredictability of the firewall actually makes it more effective,” another Chinese software engineer told me. “It becomes much harder to know what the system is looking for, and you always have to be on guard.”

And I haven't known what was going on.

Continue reading "Ah! Why didn't I think of that? (Chinese internet dept)" »

The MacBook Air chronicles #4: success with VMWare

As reported a few days ago, my new MacBook Air -- while undeniably svelte and beautiful, and while having surprisingly good battery life, and while generally performing in much snappier fashion than my Vista laptop -- was giving me trouble in one big way. I had been trying to install either VMWare Fusion or Parallels, the two systems that let you run Windows programs (on an Intel-powered Mac) side by side with Mac OS X. Or that's what the two programs are supposed to do. I couldn't get either of them actually to start up a session of Windows XP. (Was I going to load Vista? Let's be serious.)

Problem now solved! And it proved not to have been VMWare's fault. I don't know about Parallels -- even though I bought that program for full $80 retail at the Apple store in New York last month (it being the only one available), I never heard back on my requests to its tech support line. But VMWare, which I downloaded as a free 30-day trial product, did reply and gave me the right answer. (Details below.*) I will with relatively good cheer pony up my $80 to register the product -- or $50, after a $30 rebate for previous purchasers of the rival Parallels.

MacBook Air running WinXP, under VMWare, with "dock" of Mac program icons at the bottom:

Continue reading "The MacBook Air chronicles #4: success with VMWare" »

MacBook Air #3: Some performance comparisons

Eventually we'll get to whatever philosophical differences separate computing on the fancy new MacBook Air ultra-light machine from computing on a classy high-end ThinkPad T60 running Vista with its latest updates. (Hint: differences less profound and sweeping than many people assume.)

Also, some of the practicalities involved in shifting the center-of-gravity of your work from one platform to another. (Hint #1: If you have a lot, lot, lot of info stored in Microsoft Outlook .PST files, as I do, a full shift is not as easy as you've been told. Hint #2: At least for me, neither VMWare Fusion nor Parallels, the two programs that let Intel-powered Macs run Windows programs, has been all that simple to configure and get running -- though I remain hopeful that I'll get one of them to work!)

Let's talk today just about numbers: ones that have gotten my attention. They involve the lost-time overhead a computer imposes on you while you wait for it to work. What I've found:

Putting the computer to 'sleep' (so you can save battery power when you step away for a while). Time from issuing command till end of disk activity and screen display, three trials:
Thinkpad T60 / Vista: 12 seconds, 13 seconds, 15 seconds, average about 13 seconds. I am excluding as an anomaly the first time I ran this test, which took 80 seconds.
MacBook Air / Leopard: 3 seconds, 2 seconds, 3 seconds, average about 3 seconds.

Continue reading "MacBook Air #3: Some performance comparisons" »

MacBook Air #2: batteries etc

I’ve only just now begun installing “real” software on my newly acquired MacBook Air.* So until now, I’ve been using the Air exclusively for online activity – and haven’t been giving it the full long-airplane-flight test to see how much time it takes to run the battery down while doing real work.

Instead, I’ve done indirect tests, like setting the Air up to play nonstop streaming audio from internet radio broadcasts while running on battery power. That way, I know that it’s continually drawing power to work the WiFi and run the speaker (yes, the speaker -- just one, and not that good). The screen, though, self-dims in a way it wouldn’t if I were sitting there typing.

Still: this has been enough to give an impression. Battery life on this machine seems “pretty good,” and the time it takes to recharge the battery is not bad at all.

Continue reading "MacBook Air #2: batteries etc" »

'Great Firewall' article now online

Two week ago I mentioned that the March issue of the Atlantic -- by that point snugly in subscribers' hands! -- would include my article on how the Great Firewall of China actually works. That article is now online, here. So is the entire issue, which is full of great stuff.

Also, my interview about the article and the general China-tech scene is online here. It was conducted by the Atlantic's estimable Abby Cutler -- as the last thing she did on our staff before leaving to begin medical training. Applying the healing touch in different venues, is the way we like to think about it at the magazine.

MacBook Air: first of a series

I didn't expect to return from my latest trip to the U.S. with a brand-new MacBook Air in my hand, but for various surprising reasons that's what I brought back.*

I have not given it a full workout yet, and the reason is related to one of the quirks of this machine: it has no CD/DVD reader and is designed to install software wirelessly, either from the Internet or via a connection to another Mac or PC. I have not yet gone through the process of installing the programs I'd like to use on it, so all I've done with it is work online. Collect email, check out the news, and, yes, compose and post this message.

More reactions to come later, about the aspects of this machine that have raised most questions. How good is the battery, really -- considering that unlike most laptops, but like iPods etc, you can't change it yourself or bring a second to swap in during a plane flight? Is its 80GB hard disk big enough for modern computing life? How well does its wifi-only approach actually work, given the absence of a CD drive and an Ethernet port? Will the remote installation process let me put Parallels or VMWare on the system, so I can run the Windows programs I really care about? All this, as I say, for another day.

For today, an aesthetic and emotional reaction: This is an astonishingly successful work of industrial design. Even industrial art. Its case is very small and thin, and seems even smaller and thinner. It is very light, and seems lighter than it is. (Maybe adrenaline rush to the arm muscles?) By the specs, the processor is not tremendously fast, but the computer feels agile and responsive -- all the more so in contrast to my Vista ThinkPad. The screen is bright and big (maybe related to battery life?), and the keyboard is full-sized and convenient. It is as beautiful a piece of machinery as I have seen in a long time.

Later: how it works when I'm trying to do something more than reach web sites. Maybe the shock of aesthetic appreciation will have worn off -- somewhat -- by then.

__
* To spell it out: these reasons do not include any baksheesh, "demo copies," or other favortistic efforts by Apple or other companies.

I know I'm tempting fate by even mentioning this, but...

The latest set of patches and updates for Windows Vista, mentioned recently, really do appear to make the system noticeably faster and more responsive.

In addition to eliminating (so far) the chronic previous crashes when my laptop went into or out of hibernation, they seem to have reduced another big annoyance: the interminable periods when the computer appeared simply to be paralyzed -- "it's thinking," is the more charitable way my wife once put it -- and would not respond to keystrokes or commands. In real time these could last 30 or 40 seconds, which seemed like centuries. Such brain-dead spells -- for a fast computer with a lot of RAM -- have been cut way down.

Similarly: the new version of Lenovo's Rescue and Recovery utility (available through the ThinkVantage Update software that comes on new ThinkPads -- more info here) is a big improvement. This software makes frequent backups of everything on your computer, which are obviously reassuring to have. But its original version was a significant culprit in my first big problem with Vista on a ThinkPad -- that it gobbled up every bit of available disk space. The latest release works faster, takes less disk space, and is easier to use.

The Vista patches will be part of the "Service Pack 1" that is circulating informally and is supposed to be officially released soon. New ThinkPads presumably come with the latest Lenovo utilities installed. If my first exposure to Vista and the Lenovo utilities had been to this new, improved incarnation -- and I hadn't had the last year of hatred-inducing frustration behind me -- my impression would have been much more positive, and I would now own fewer Macs. I suppose I've merely re-proved the principle that wiser souls discovered long ago. Never buy or use a new release of Windows, or perhaps of any major system software, until it's been on the market at least a year and has gone through its first "Service Pack." Live and learn.

Nerds only: a Vista update

The household census of computers here at Beijing HQ now includes:

- 2 WinXP laptops (one ThinkPad T40, one Compaq. This last is my wife's; Stoic that she is, she makes do with one.)

- 3 Macs (Mini, iBook, and the unbelievably glamorous MacBook Air, subject for another time)

- 1 Vista laptop (ThinkPad T60; used to be two Vistas, until I "downgraded" the T40 back to XP)

Each has its place in the great and intricate division of local labor. The Vista machine is partly a test bed to see how things are developing in Vista land. I have been making a list of tweaks and improvements to mention, but here is one that immediately caught my eye:

The latest WindowsUpdate for Vista (via WindowsUpdate on the Start menu -- important patches usually come out on the second Tuesday of each month), includes #943899, "an update that improves the performance, responsiveness, and reliability of Windows Vista." As if there might be any room for improvement in those realms.... The good news is that this patch is aimed at one of the most egregious (for me) Vista problems: its tendency to crash, hang, or churn for minutes on end when going in or out of hibernation. In specific the welcome news is:

This update improves performance, responsiveness, and reliability of Windows Vista in various scenarios. This update resolves the following issues on a Windows Vista-based computer:

• You receive a "Stop 0x000000A0" error when you try to switch the computer to the hibernate state.

• You receive a "Stop 0x0000009f" error when you switch the computer to the hibernate state or to the standby state. Or, you receive this Stop error when you resume the computer from the hibernate state or from the standby state. This problem occurs on a computer that has a wireless network connection.

• The disk does not spin down after a specified time of inactivity.

Well, those are the exact problems I often have. If this truly "resolves" the issue, then Huzzah. We will see. If you have Vista on a laptop, check it out.

News of the future: Internet, Olympics, Great Firewall

I believe that the Atlantic's March 2008 issue is already in subscribers' hands. The link on our main web site will be available in a little while. (Another illustration of the "Better than Free" principle laid out by Kevin Kelly!)

In the new issue I have an article about the "Great Firewall of China" -- the government's means of regulating the internet, or trying to. When that article comes out, you'll see why I was so interested in this recent AFP/Yahoo news story, about the government's deliberations over what to do with the GFW when Beijing is crawling with foreigners during the Olympic games. Basically: I have some inside details that complement what the Olympic organizers are now saying in public. Stay tuned.

(Thanks to Daniel Lippman for tip.)

Correct link for "Better than Free" essay by Kevin Kelly

The previous item, about how organizations might be able to sell the same information they are giving away via the internet, had the wrong link to Kevin Kelly's valuable "Better than Free" essay. Here is the right link -- also now fixed in original item.

A very good essay about the economics of "free" info on the internet

(Updated to fix bad link.)
The Atlantic -- which was early to the idea of making its content available free on the internet, then went to a subscriber-only model, and now has come back -- is one of many publications wrestling with the question of how, exactly, you sell something you are simultaneously giving away.

One of the best accounts I've seen of why our current approach might make sense -- and more generally, of why individuals and organizations may still be able to do well selling information they're also offering free -- is this one, from Kevin Kelly, on his "The Technium" blog. His analysis does ring true to me, and it clarifies some possibilities I've heard discussed mainly in hazy terms.

Everyone knows that the world demand for sophisticated, rapid, reliable information and analysis can only keep rising -- and everyone also knows that the traditional models of paying for such information are in trouble, with newspapers being the most obvious case. Ten years from now, or twenty, or some time, a new way of paying for the information will have evolved. I found this essay useful in pointing toward some potential paths of evolution.

(Thanks to Paul Holbrook, of the Zoot users' forum on Yahoo, for this tip.)

Mitch Kapor on spreadsheets, Magellan, etc

Yesterday, a NYT tech column suggested that Mitch Kapor of Lotus was responsible for the fundamental innovation of the spreadsheet.

Today I said, quoting Dottie Hall, that actually Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston had invented the spreadsheet, with VisiCalc for the Apple II -- but Kapor had brought it to the PC world with Lotus 1-2-3.

Kapor writes to say that's wrong too!

As long as we're beating a dead frog, let me add my two Linden dollars*: Bill Gross was responsible for Lotus Magellan, not me. I had nothing to do with it.

Also, "and while he (me, that is) can be credited with introducing the spreadsheet for the PC," is not true either. Both VisiCalc and MultiPlan were available when the IBM PC shipped in October 1981. 1-2-3 didn't hit the market until January 1983.

As for Bill Gross: I've written a whole string of articles lauding him for the programs he has created. The only one of these articles I can find online right now is this. from my own days as a NYT tech columnist.** Gross was also the force behind a program I have praised so often I should be on its payroll, X1. (To spell it out: I'm not, and I paid for my copy of X1.) I had assumed that as Kapor was institutionally responsible for Lotus Magellan, but he should know.

And as for spreadsheet genealogy, I have already received so many accounts of how this happened that I have decided to quote only Kapor's for the moment, since the rest have so many variations on points large and small.

____
* For those embarrassed to ask: Linden dollars are the currency of Second Life.

** Back in my day as NYT tech columnist, the paper ran a correction when I made a mistake. I'm just saying.....

For the record, two (interesting!) boiled-frog updates

Both referring to yesterday's shock-horror revelation that the NYT, Oxford Univ, and a skilled tech writer had combined to repeat a cruel bit of misinformation.

1) My friend Dottie Hall, a veteran of Microsoft, Symantec, Eclipse Aviation, and other ventures, points out in her blog that the boiled frog story was not the only canard in the NYT article. The column, by G. Paschal Zachary, also said this:

Businesses crave a sweet spot: where the line is drawn in favor of the innovator. The late Akio Morita, founder of Sony, talked about satisfying appetites that people didn’t even know they had. He achieved such a feat with the Sony Walkman, the music player introduced in 1979. While at the Lotus Development Corporation, [Mitch] Kapor created another such “killer app,” or application: the spreadsheet for the PC.

Mitch Kapor is a wonderful guy, creator of such truly innovative programs as Agenda and Magellan during his years at Lotus and in recent years hard at work on the innovative Chandler project. And while he can be credited with introducing the spreadsheet for the PC, namely Lotus 1-2-3, that was less a break through than the real innovation of creating the spreadsheet itself. All honor for this latter achievement lies (as Dottie Hall points out) with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who invented VisiCalc for the Apple II.

2) Reader Gregory Sokoloff points out a version of the boiled-frog story that, if we called it boiled-salaryman, might actually be true. He lived in Japan when I did, in the late 1980s, and reports:

You may remember that the most common form of bath in homes was of a design not found in the West. The bath would first be filled with cold water, then a natural gas heater would be lit and the water would slowly circulate from the bath into the heater and then back into the bath, much like a heated swimming pool. The recirculation was achieved simply through convection without any pump, and thus the device was very, very quiet. Apparently, people commonly would get into their baths when the water was tepid, fall asleep, and then wake up with serious burns requiring treatment in a hospital. I don't know if there were deaths. Of course, only one who has lived in Japan can fully appreciate how sleepy and inebriated many Japanese are by the time they take a bath after rounds in the local bars (the best named one where I lived was the "Salaryman Daigaku" ["Salaryman University"]).

I may be repeating an urban myth here, but a good friend of mine their swore she witnessed the aftermath of such an incident.

So, consistent with my emphasis on the scientific approach to tall tales, I hereby request that henceforth people begin the cliched story thus: "Throw a salaryman into a boiling hot bath, and he'll scramble right out. But put a salaryman in a nice comfy tub, and....."

You really do learn something by reading the paper

And what I learned from today's New York Times is that tomorrow the Atlantic will remove the firewall that for years has applied to most articles in the print magazine and our very extensive archives.

Hmmm! The Atlantic, believe it or not, has been a serial innovator and pioneer in the web area. Back in the dimly-remembered mid-1990s it was one of the first non-tech magazines even to have a web site and to put much of its content online free. A few years ago it changed to the firewall / subscribers only model. Now, with the centrality of the web to the kinds of discussions we hope to provoke, this latest change, which should certainly continue the expansion of the site's influence and audience.

It will also do something that I think will be of even greater long-term importance:

The Atlantic Monthly, as we have pointed out oh, once or twice in the last while, is now 150 years old. In fact, working toward 151.

There is a phenomenal amount of fascinating and historically important material in our archives from those 150+ years. Not all of it is available online. (If you have seen the bookcases full of back volumes, you know what a gigantic challenge the mere scanning and OCR-ing will be.) Some of the highlights have been collected by Robert Vare and Daniel Smith in their superb recent 150th Anniversary anthology.

But a lot of unexplored material is available, and searchable, in the archives, and this will be an important journalistic, academic, and historic resource. Once again, a new era begins.

(I no longer have to say, "Subscribers Only" about some articles. Still -- subscribe! The timeless story of media-and-technology is that as new "delivery vehicles" arrive, they create additional forms of receiving information; eliminate a few old forms, like the cuneiform tablet; but mainly expand the range of choices people have by leaving most old forms in place. Despite television, we still have radio; despite radio and television and the internet, we still have books; despite email we still have phone calls; and for quite a while despite the internet we will still have something physically like a book or magazine, just because there are so many times and places where it's the best way to see what you want to look at. Eg: On my latest 13-hour plane flight, some of passengers mainly used laptops or iPods. Virtually all had some kind of book or magazine. Magazine content, words and pictures alike, looks far far better in real magazines -- though the web version is indispensable.)

In any case, another new beginning as of tomorrow.

I maintain statesmanlike silence; the readers speak!

... about Mac, Vista, hibernation, and so on. Ongoing commentary on previous discussion after the jump.

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Special one-time offer: Comments! Vista! Mac!

As promised, I am giving a rest to the whole question of Vista, the Mac, hibernation, blue-screen crashes, etc. We're phenomenally fortunate to have today's computers at all -- I remember the days of the TELEX machine and the suitcase-sized Compaqs and Kaypros -- and I forswear further whining. And to think back to the days before most software had "auto-save" or "recovery" features. Brrrrrr!

Unfortunately a lot of interesting e-mail arrived only after that promise kicked in. So after the jump, a few of the interesting addenda and responses. Anyone who would like to pursue the issue is invited to do so via Comments, enabled for this post only.* Anyone who is bored by this entire topic -- Sorry!

*Update: Never mind! The Movable Type editing screen I am looking at has the box for "Accept Comments" clicked Yes. But the actual post shows no Comments line. Oh well. The e-mails below are still interesting, and they will have to suffice.

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Let's let Bill Gates have the last word about Windows Vista

... as he did, in this widely-circulated but still fascinating and completely winning video clip.

I agree with my Atlantic colleague Ms. McArdle that computer operating systems should be a matter of practicality rather than ideology. (Although I prefer to think of myself as a pantheist, rather than an agnostic like her.) I've always had both Mac and Windows systems and have continually tried out others. It's a question of where your "real" work gets done, and that's what I'm reexamining to see how much of a PITA it would be to change..

And in response to one of many very interesting emails....

I noticed that both you and your friend both experienced long resume times from hibernate. There's good reason for that, which is that it has to read your complete memory state from disk. This is a very slow process, which is limited by hardware. I was wondering -- why don't you just use sleep/standby? My Thinkpad wakes up in about 1 second and is completely responsive. I always hear people complain about hibernate, but my thought is always -- why use it then?

I say: you're right. The Vista "sleep" command actually works very well. But it draws a little bit of current, and when you're really hoarding power or shutting down for a long time, "hibernation," which draws no current, would seem the better choice. EXCEPT for the very slow recovery time. In part that's is because a system like mine has to read 2GB worth of memory-state from the hard disk. But it's also ... something else, since even after the computer appears to have regained its previous state it takes an inexplicably long time before it will respond to any commands.

Oh well. As Bill Gates says above, Ask me after Microsoft has put out its next version of Windows. Until then, as with the Beijing air, I'll give this subject a rest!

A little less coyness on Mac-vs-Vista

As mentioned recently, ongoing struggles with Windows Vista, here in our Vista/XP/XP/Mac iBook two-person, four-laptop household, have led to me consider all alternatives. Now, the rest of the story:

Soberingly enough, I have used personal computers longer than several of my fellow Atlantic "Voices" have been alive. I got -- really, built -- my first computer in 1978. (Taste of days gone by: "The SOL-20 was probably the first PC to incorprate a keyboard and video with the machine.") It used an Intel 8080 chip, and as the Intel-PC-Windows paradigm has emerged, I've stuck to that course.

Through those years, I've considered switching tracks to the Mac world three times.

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No political content! #1: Back to the Mac?

The message below is from my "friend" -- never met him, but corresponded for years -- Kenneth Rhee of Northern Kentucky University. We made contact long ago via a support forum for the nonpareil info-handling program Zoot*. Zoot is Windows-only, so Rhee, like me, has done his main work on PCs.

Recently he made The Change -- after wrestling with a new ThinkPad that came with Windows Vista pre-installed. This week Rhee submitted the following report on the the Zoot forum, plus some passages from a followup email to me:

I switched over to the Mac last year after getting a bit frustrated with Vista (I still run Vista in my Thinkpad on a rare occasion if I want to get "frustrated-little joke here but it seems to happen every time I use it these days).

My experience goes something like this. I wanted to use a few Mac programs and bought a MacBook thinking that I'll probably use it 10-15% of my time. After a month, I noticed that I was using my Mac 85-90% of the time, and having more fun using it rather than getting more frustrated fixing things or waiting for things to happen. So, I switched over completely and bought a new MacBook Pro with Leopard to replace my Thinkpad and haven't looked back.

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More Yuletide cheer, software department

Might as well keep this coming, while Santa is preparing his lists and so on.

1) My choice for best-ever utility for indexing and searching hard drives on a PC, X1, has come out with a new release with numerous small but important improvements. Speed, stability, range of files it can index, etc. If you happen to be using Vista, the new release is also stable under Vista, as the old one wasn't.

I've often complimented X1 in the Atlantic's pages, but here's the sincerest sign of my regard: Officially you can get away without ever paying anything for X1. After your initial 30-day free trial expires, you just keep on with the unlicensed trial version, which gives you no tech support and has certain limitations but is better than most other indexers available. (Or, you can use the similar limited version offered free as Yahoo Desktop Search.) I've gotten by on the trial version for years. But now I have actually ponied up my $50 for a legit license to the "Professional Client" version. My official reason is that it does a few things, like indexing archived Outlook files, that the free version doesn't -- plus the tech support. My real reason is that I have used this product so often for so long that I feel I owe these people something. Check it out.

2) Chandler - where do I start? This is one of the great epics/dramas/melodramas of the last two decades of computer-dom. In part it is the fulfillment of Mitch Kapor's vision of creating the perfect tool for organizing the data you need for your daily life. He began this quest decades ago, with the creation of the sainted Lotus Agenda program when he was in charge of Lotus. (Part of that background here and here). In part it's a very demanding test of what kind of software can be developed on a non-commercial, purely open-source basis. It even has an Atlantic connection, since part of its vision is to realize the vision of Vannevar 'As We May Think' Bush, who in our pages laid out the principles of the internet and of information management more than 60 years ago. It's also just an engrossing story -- one told in the recent book Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg, which as its site shows I liked enough to blurb effusively.

Saying anything more about the Chandler saga would be too exhausting, except for this: a usable version now exists, even though it has only some of the features envisioned for the grand climax of the project. It is usable enough that I actually am using it. You can start here to find out more. Warning: at this point, it's still in the "mainly for tinkerers" stage. But it's very interesting, and is free.

Merry Christmas to all!

Also just in time for Christmas: Windows XP / SP3

As mentioned earlier, the good news for Windows Vista users is that Service Pack 1 is heaving into view. According to early word from Office Watch, it will be somewhat faster and more reliable.

The other news -- well, let's consider this good news too: Service Pack 3 for Windows XP is also in its beta stage, for official release some time next year. According to this recent report on CNET news.com, via reader Chet Shannon, the long-in-the-tooth Windows XP with its new SP3 is twice as fast (on several benchmark tests involving Microsoft Office functions) as Vista, even with its new SP1:

Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP's 35 seconds. Vista's performance with the service pack increased less than 2 percent compared to performance without SP1--much lower than XP's SP3 improvement of 10 percent.

More details about the test at CNET's site. I'll think of this as Happy Holiday news for XP users -- putting the XP into Xmas, perhaps.

Just in time for Christmas: some (apparently) positive Vista news!

I've mentioned before how much I value the Office Watch website / newsletter. It is basically sympathetic to the Big Two products from Microsoft, Windows and Office, but it takes an informed and completely no-BS approach toward the good and bad aspects of them.

Therefore I was cheered to read the latest dispatch, under the headline "Vista Service Pack 1 is looking good." For those who haven't been through the drill before, the "Service Pack" is the omnibus set of bug-fixes and improvements that Microsoft puts out six to twelve months after major new releases of its software. The standing joke is that Service Pack 1 (SP1) should be considered the "real" release, everything before that being an extended beta-test period that users have to pay to participate in. Often there's a SP2 as well. Zillions of PC worldwide are running happily right now under Windows XP / SP2.

Since buying a ThinkPad T60 factory-installed with the first release of Vista early this year, I've been unhappily triple-tracking my own computing life. I have a Mac iBook, which I need to connect with the Atlantic's head-office server; the Vista ThinkPad T60, which I've kept running as a test bed; and a kind of heirloom ThinkPad T41, on which I installed Vista but then "downgraded" to XP/SP2, and which is both more reliable and faster than the Vista machine. On this one I do much of my actual work.

Last month, as a Thanksgiving gift, Microsoft (and later Lenovo) engineers explained how I could keep the new system from gobbling up every bit of the 105-GB storage on my TP60's hard disk. I was thankful for that! What it didn't change was the slowness and unreliability of Vista on this machine. I always have to allow between three and six minutes for the machine to become usable after I start it up or bring it out of "hibernation." It takes about as long to shut it down. At least twice a week, sometimes more, I have a "blue screen of death" system crash under Vista, which happens maybe once a month on the XP machine. One occurred just minutes ago, while I was on a Skype call on the Vista machine.

But that's in the past! Office Watch says help is at hand, in the form of SP1:

While installing Vista SP1 isn't always easy, the final result is worth the trouble. In our test Vista SP1 is noticeably more stable than the version previously foisted on the public. [Note: "foisted" is the mot juste here, and it demonstrates Office Watch's spirit.] Take with a grain of salt the talk of performance improvements in Vista SP1, especially regarding file copying and network transfers. The 'boost' is really fixing Vista bugs and putting Vista on the same performance level as Windows XP. .... When Vista SP1 is released to the public in 2008, we're inclined to recommend getting it. Though we know that most people are wisely staying with Windows XP for the moment, Vista Service Pack 1 might tip the balance in favor of Vista for new computers.

According to Office Watch, anyone "brave enough" can prowl around the Microsoft web site and find the beta version of Vista SP1. (More tips on finding it here.) Having put in my time as an involuntary beta tester of Vista, I am not going to do that and am instead going to wait until the real SP1 is released early next year. But for those of you who can't wait to open presents, be my guests...

Crying wolf: Barry Diller, the Economist, and China

Three updates! Below

The Economist.com takes at face value a silly speech by Barry Diller*, based on a silly survey, and draws silly sky-is-falling conclusions.

The headline on the Economist.com item was: "America's emobyte** deficit: China's youth surpass their American rivals online." The story opened with a quote from Diller:
:

“THE Chinese people seem to be way ahead of Americans in living a digital life,” said Barry Diller, an American media mogul, last week in a speech to students in Beijing...[Diller's data] revealed that in this arena as in so much else, China is surging ahead..

They "seem" to be way ahead? I suppose, in the same sense in which I "seem" to be way taller than Yao Ming. Both of these seem true only if you ignore the actual facts. In a million different ways China deserves to be taken very seriously. But there are only two ways in which Chinese people really do seem to be "ahead" of Americans digitally.

Continue reading "Crying wolf: Barry Diller, the Economist, and China" »

Media problems in two countries: Part I, China

Two weeks ago I mentioned the difference that a VPN from WiTopia.net had made in my internet life in China. (VPN details below.*)

A few days later, a Chinese blogger named Ruan Yifeng mentioned my report on his own blog, and went on to discuss other ways Chinese users could deal with the internet filters collectively known as the Great FireWall (GFW). The original Chinese version of his post is here; a translation by the indispensable Roland Soong** of Hong Kong, on his ZonaEuropa/ESWN blog, is here; just for the hell of it, an auto-translated version via Google's online translation tools is here. It's very interesting to compare this with Soong's native-speaker, hand-crafted version.

Two days ago, Ruan Yifeng said that he had been reported to the authorities for putting such subversive information on the internet. (Original Chinese version here; Roland Soong's translation here; Google auto-translate version here.) From the ESWN version:

I just found out today that someone had just reported my "Methods of bypassing the Great Firewall of China" to the China Internet Illegal and Harmful Information Reporting Center.
I cannot help but say: Fuck, what a stupid jerk! No wonder someone said: When there is a shameless, disgusting government, there will necessarily be shameless, disgusting people.

(The auto-translate version of the second sentence is: "I really could not contain himself: damn, really such a SB!")

Ruan Yifeng says that Baidu (China's leading search engine, with a huge lead here over Google) has already filtered out his site, and "it is a matter of time when government filtering occurs." His whole saga is very much worth reading at Soong's site, for what it says about control on expression in China -- and the spirit of those trying to work their way around it. For instance, Ruan Yifeng directs his real fury not at the censors who implement the GFW but at the Chinese fellow citizen who informed on him:

"It is the existence of people like you that makes people despair about this country."

Continue reading "Media problems in two countries: Part I, China" »

Not so thankful for this at Thanksgiving (Japan Big Brother dept)

Flying from Beijing to Tokyo this morning -- generally an invigorating experience! Japan looks startlingly neat and organized even if you're arriving from Switzerland. And when you're coming not from Switzerland but from China.... Anyhow I arrived excited at the prospect of a few days here.

Unfortunately Japan's way of ushering in the Thanksgiving holidays has been to institute mandatory fingerprinting and photographing of all foreigners entering the country. Let me put this bluntly: this is an incredibly degrading, offputting, and hostility-generating process. The comment is not anti-Japanese: when the U.S. does this to foreigners, it's wrong and degrading too (as many people, including me, have pointed out over the years). But Japan has just ushered in this procedure, and they deserve to take some heat for it.

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Thankful on Thanksgiving (Windows Vista dept.)

My family has so many real and important things to be thankful for that of course I can only address the ephemera here. For instance:

Windows Vista is no longer consuming the totality of my hard drive! Talk about your happy Thanksgiving Day!

Anton Kucer and his colleagues at Microsoft dutifully tried to figure out why, on a 105GB hard drive containing maybe 30-35GB of "real" data, my computer kept showing that it had virtually no space left.

They came up with an answer! We won't exactly call it a bug, and we won't exactly call it user error, but we will call it an interaction among three forces: Lenovo ThinkPad design, Microsoft Vista design; and JFallows user design. All details are after the jump, but the headline version is: if you have Vista and are using a ThinkPad, there is a way to keep your hard drive from being totally gobbled up. I take my Thanksgivings where I can find them.

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Keyboard wear update: this time, it's depressing

Here is the the way the keyboard on my Thinkpad T60 looked three months ago, when it was four months old.

Here's the way it looks today, at seven months of age, after three more articles and one bazillion additional emails have been pounded out on its keys:

This second one is a little harder to see, but here's the casualty count.

Now entirely gone: the E, N, and A keys, plus the < marking.
On their way: L, M, R, S, and >
Worried: D, O.
Should be worried: U, B

No wonder my fingers are tired -- I mean, strong! And good thing China is dotted with electronic parts shops where I can buy a new keyboard, cheap, when too many letters vanish from this one. I can probably find a supplier who sent them to the factory in the first place.

When I find that guy, maybe I'll ask him whether they would consider investing an extra 50 cents for more durable keytop decals. (Yes, I know the Mac's, and others, are molded in.)

About that plan to "speed up" Thanksgiving air travel

Sorry to ring in the Thanksgiving travel week on a discouraging note, but: the plan announced with fanfare from the White House last week, to reduce airline delays by opening up military airspace, is preposterous. It will not make the slightest difference in airline delays or the general neuralgia of Thanksgiving travel. You think the media were gullible about Administration claims five years ago? Gee, it's good to see that that will never happen again....

What's wrong with this plan?

1) Military airspace is not that big a factor in NYC area or BOS-WASH corridor travel, which is where the worst of the delays originate. The FAA has a great little website, here, which shows you the status of "special use airspace" (including military space) pretty much in real time. Here is how it looked mid-afternoon Friday EST last week -- a busy travel time!

It's not worth explaining all the details here, but the main point is: there aren't that many "special use" areas near the big East Coast airports. If New York City were where Camp Lejeune is, in North Carolina, then military airspace might be an issue.* But, umm, it's not. The NY-area special airspace that looks biggest -- the brown thing off Long Island, which says ZNY (meaning that its airspace is controlled by "New York Center") -- is a "warning area," which differs from those off-limits to airliners and is way out over the ocean anyway.

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The best $39.99 I have spent in China

Or maybe: the best $39.99 I have spent on a legitimate purchase, so I don't have to weigh this against the boxed set of all episodes, ever, of The Simpsons, plus all seasons of The Sopranos, plus some other stuff, which together went for something like that price at Even Better Than Movie World in Shanghai.*

And maybe: the best $39.99 not spent on alcoholic beverages, so I also don't have to weigh it against the mixed case of Rogue Dead Guy, Brooklyn IPA, Red Seal, and other American microbrews that I got in Shanghai, back when I still was trying to find good beer and hadn't yet embraced my fate of drinking Yanjing etc through the rest of my time in China. (By the way, shrewd business planning by the Chinese beer industry! These same local Yanjing-etc brewers are ideally positioned to withstand the current and alarming world-wide shortage of, gasp, hops. You can't run out of what you don't use.)

In any case: I'm glad to have spent just now $39.99 for a year's subscription to Personal VPN, from WiTopia.net. I tried it out of desperation and found that it solved two nagging and related problems.

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Watching technology change in real time

This picture shows three ways I have paid for transportation in China:

The green card at the top is the wonderful, convenient, and all-purpose Shanghai Transport debit card. It is more modern than anything in the United States. You add money to it at a subway kiosk -- for me, usually 100RMB at a time, or $13.50. Then whenever you use almost any kind of transportation in Shanghai -- a subway, a bus, a ferryboat, and, crucially, a taxi -- you swipe the card across a reader and it deducts the fare. The joys of never having to find change for taxi fare are hard to imagine until you've experienced them. (Plus the joys of flat-fare non-tipping, a subject for another day.)

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