Summary of this week:

This week: June 16-22, 2008

Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Saturday - Sunday

Monday June 16, 2008

My travels continue, and for this trip at least, that means spotty broadband access to the Internet.

There seems to be some fussing going on among the Associated Press and a lot of other people. The AP feels that others are quoting too much of their stories without giving them credit. Other people feel that the AP is being to heavy handed. Maybe I am too dense to notice the problem here. I treat this like writing: if you use someone else's material, you give them credit for it.

This post predicts that the rest of 2008 will see many blogs disappear. It could happen. Earlier this year we had the story about how some bloggers were working themselves to death trying to scoop everyone else. The goal was to be hot and make money with advertising. Many blogs have tried to become small news agencies. Few have succeeded in that pursuit. My Day Book is just that - my little recording of things I notice daily. There is little or no profit potential here.

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Tuesday June 17, 2008

I drove 1,100 miles. No Internet access on the Interstate Highway System. Maybe those guys in Congress could...

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Wednesday June 18, 2008

Ahhhhh. Back home and back on a regular schedule.

As expected, everyone wanted to download Firefox 3 as soon as it was available. The result was predictable - a crashed web site.

The past repeats itself. This time it is with Graphical Processing Units (GPU). I recall a time in the late 1980s through the early 1990s when you needed an image processing card in the computer to do serious image processing. I wrote a lot of integer-only routines so I could do image processing without the extra board. General CPUs became fast enough to do the work, so the image processing board went away. Now people want to do video processing (mostly in games), so we NEED a GPU.

Everyone watched Tiger Woods win the U.S. Open on the Internet. The number of online viewers set some type of new record. Why? Because the tournament ended on a Monday when people were AT work (were they WORKING?).

Toshiba now has the world's lightest portable computer. The Prtege weighs 2.4 pounds, has a 12" screen, a 128 Gbyte solid state disk - and costs $3,000. I won't buy one anytime soon.

AMD is trying to move into the netbook portable computer market. No announcement on availability yet.

This is a trend I see everywhere. This post calls it the "Coming World of Sensors." Whatever you call it, cell phones have many types of sensors and almost everyone has a cell phone. The most obvious are the cameras, but cell phones can sense earthquakes and weather and so on as well.

This post is interesting to me in that it has to appear on an outlying web site. The story doesn't come to major media outlets. Ross Perot explains the economics of an aging population in America. Far more people are collecting Social Security and collecting it for many more yeats than the creators of the system envisioned. The result is predictable - and not good. Congress won't touch this because they won't be re-elected. That surprises me because being in Congress is not a great job. Being a former Congressman is a far higher paying job with more power and perks. None of this makes sense to me.

Verizon FIOS is pushing speeds up to 50MBPS for downloads. I'm not going to measure data speeds, but if FIOS is becoming faster it is becoming faster. I hope thier faster faster service comes to Northern Virginia. Verizon recently ran their cables through my neighborhood so they could compete with COMCAST. We shall see.

There are many productivity tips out there, this one makes sense. Darren Rowse advocates batch processing of tasks. I use that technique and it works well for me as well.

Apple continues to sell a lot of computers. Their May 2008 sales were 50% higher than their May 2007 sales. Apple may sell 10 million computers in 2008. I like the push that Apple is giving everyone else in the industry.

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Thursday June 19, 2008

I like this short post on writing short. Writing in 140 characters has become important to people who Twitter and otherwise write on their cell phone keyboards. The advice holds true for longer writing.

This web site allows you to design your own portable computer bag. Interesting.

Scott Karp discusses the AP story about quoting and linking and paying and arguing...

Mozilla did set some kind of record with 8 million downloads of Firefox 3 in one day. I have downloaded it on my home computer (iMac). I was disturbed that my del.icio.us button died. I will look at that. I cannot believe that Mozilla would not make the browser compatible with it.

Verizon's really-high-speed Internet access will be available in Virginia (where I live). It will, however, cost $90 a month. I think I would opt for a slower speed and lower cost.

This post on Darren Rowse's blog is from author Karen Andrews. Blogging made her a better writer. I would agree. Writing makes me a better writer. Even writing these little sentences in the Day Book makes me a better writer. I was helped long ago by several writers who gave the same advice about writing: write.

This is one of those studies that I wonder why anyone had to do. They found that spending time with low-achieving students in school slowed the learning of high-achieving students. I guess you have to do the study to prove what everyone knows to some people.

DARPA is struggling to attract top scientists and engineers. Some people are surprised by this. I - an employee of the U.S. Government - am not. Why work for bureaucrats for low pay when you can do the studies that DARPA sponsors and be payed much more money and work for people who actually appreciate your work?

Now this might work. The 4-H is starting a program to show kids that science and engineering can actually be interesting. It seems that many kids feel that science is all memorization. I wonder what kid taught that nonsense to a kid, or maybe it was some adults who did that.

And guess what? Some of the files on your computer were put there by other people without your knowledge. This man was not fired when someone finally understood that.

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Friday Jun 20, 2008

Is it illigal to use someone else's open WiFi network? I say no, and this post agrees with me. Neither of us are lawyers, so...

The One Laptop Per Child project has shipped 1 million computers. They missed their goal by 149 million computers. Even with lots of volunteer help, it isn't easy to execute large projects, and I deem shipping 150 million computers a large project.

Apple has sold five billion (with a B) songs on iTunes. They are also renting or selling 50,000 movies a day. Do the math, Apple should push out some 18.25 million movies this year. This comes out to about $110M in movie business this year.

For a little fun, The Great NERF office war.

The OpenSuse 11.0 Linux distribution is out.

I found this DailyWritingTips post fasinating. Their Five Ways to Write Faster seem to contradict one another. They list the planned or disciplined techniques like outlining and research with the looser techniques of don't worry about the quality of the first draft and write ten minutes non-stop. Everything they list has worked for me at one time or another on one piece of writing or another. I advise trying them all and noting how, where, when, and why they work.

Boeing won its protest in the Air Force tanker contract. This will drag on. It makes sense that Americans should build products for the American government. There is, however, another side or two to this. Sending work elsewhere also spurs American companies to get off their butts and innovate. Recall that the best thing that ever happened to Boeing was when they LOST the contract for the C-5A cargo plane. That freed them to design and build the 747 which worked out pretty well for them.

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Saturday June 21, 2008

In print: this month's issue of Crosstalk has several articles of interest all a out software quality.

Watts S. Humphrey's article makes a comment that most people overlook - software has much higher quality than other human-written documents. When I show this to people they usually respond with a snide grammar remark.
Capers Jones concludes that testing software is not enough. Inspections are necessary to raise the defect removals above 85%.
Jeffrey Voas writes about Phantom Users of software - the hardware, operating system,available memory, disk space, drivers, other background processes that compete for resources. Sometimes phantom users cause more problems that traditional inputs.

The Chinese government is tightening its Internet censorship and monitoring. Some people actually believed the Chinese and expected a loosening of control as the Olympics approached. According to O'Reilly Radar, the Chinese still lead the world in malware.

This post has links to several article of interest to writers who work at home. One of my favorites are these photos comparing fantasy and reality.

The readers of ZenHabits submitted their favorite productivity tips. Quite a variety. Me? I set aside times for writing where I "sprint" and draft between 1,500 and 2,000 words in an hour. The next day I read and edit.

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Sunday June 22, 2008

Here is a rather convincing article on the benefits of telecommuting. It is from Sun's experiences. Some jobs won't work with telecommuting, but I believe that we could be doing far more of this than we do. The greatest inhibitor I see is the supervisor who doesn't trust the employees.

Circuit City continues to slide in the market.

This article discusses many of the realities of broadband internet access in the suburbs. I live in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. I use a cable modem to access the Internet. So does the author. The service is good, but could be better.

Two photos 30 years apart. This is interesting - the Microsoft group in 1978 just before moving from New Mexico to Seattle and just a few weeks ago.

Yahoo Finance has a list of ten best cities to live and work in. No "major" cities on the list. Houston, Austin, and Sacramento are big cities but not Dallas, San Francisco, Phoenix, and so on.

Here is an interesting post on the up and down sides of multitasking. There are many aspects to this, and I find most of them revolve around different people using the same word with different meanings, i.e. talking past one another. Switching from task to task is inefficient. Socializing with more than one person at a time can be fun and enriching. These areas are too dissimilar to discuss with the same word.

Email me at d.phillips@computer.org
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