Attention to details marks the good UI

MIT is so rich that the music library lends out iPods loaded with a bunch of music from the library's collection! Which means, I have finally started listening to music on these devices.

Today I noticed something very interesting: if I remove the headphone from the iPod, it automatically pauses playing. I guess they look for changes in offered impedance as the cue to pause. This can turn out to be useful if the headphones get disconnected mid-sentence while you are listening to an audiobook during your run.

But of course there is a bug. I had connected the iPod to my Sony receiver. Then I moved to my Bose headphones. The iPod paused, but fails to recognize the bose headphone until I restart playing from the main menu. Difference in offered impedance/capacitance/inductance?

80s' viruses as inspiration for DTNs

Viruses which were transmitted on floppy disks were probably the first application of "delay tolerant" networks. There was no contemporaneous connectivity between two nodes. And viruses opportunistically piggybacked themselves onto other files. Sometimes a virus copy would get lucky and reach a hub in the floppy social network, and then could reach a HUGE number of other computers very quickly. The only difference between DTN packets and virises is that viruses usually don't have a targeted destination.

Disney reuses code too

http://en.andrenoel.com.br/?p=8

The iPhone hype

I have always been a closet luddite. Yet, as pogue puts it, I could not have not heard about the iPhone. And, since I've started working with the very cool n800 that John Ankcorn@Nokia Research gave me, I paid some attention to the ads. I have to admit, the iPhone looks very cool. In particular: the landscape-portrait orientation sensing, browsing songs by scrolling thru cd album-art, and the image zooming facilities. I couldn't put a finger on what it was that made it cool. Pogue puts it brilliantly:

"things on the screen have a physics all their own"

There. that's what I like about the iPhone. This from someone who does not even own an iPod, and can never understand the appeal of a dumb circular wheel to navigate your albums.

Ubuntu as a windows file?

Wubi, when installed, is seen as a HUGE file on windows. It also modifies the windows boot menu to offer to load up this huge file. The file, it turns out, when loaded, turns out to be ubuntu. So it is not just the linux kernel which is loaded up. The file is essentially a partition that windows is not aware of - it can (I am guessing) have empty space where you can put new ext3 files as well as install new programs!

Wireless facts on google video

Last week, on video.google.com, I saw a video on testing google's metro wifi network in MountainView when it was first set up (search for testing metro wifi if the URL turns out not to be stable). Among the things that I gleaned from there are the following facts:

• wifi is good for 300 ft + goes thru 1 wall well
• The testing looked for
  
• coverage (using Torius, a commercial company whose antennae were deployed in the injection layer of the network - which is an intermediate WiMax layer)
• capacity (choices were ttcp/iperf nuttcp). iperf was chosen for simplicity + #options
• LiveHttpHeader utility for firefox was also useful

And yesterday I watched a video of Van Jacobson talking about a new networking paradigm he wants to push. As with many of his papers, he has a quite unique way of looking at things. Definitely worth a watch!

Google video is proving surprisingly useful - lots of other "software engineer" type of videos are also out there; including a 2 hour introduction to python by an author of python in a nutshell and python cookbook.

On technology adoption

My officemate Chintan likes to think about how technology gets adopted - the classical model is that initially enthusiasts pick it up despite the cost; and over time, becomes economically worthwhile for everyone.

There can be surprising niches where it makes economical sense even for non-enthusiasts to invest in some things. Here is an example:

Riga Development, a wireless-technology firm in Toronto, has worked with hotels in Canada and the United States to replace ageing analogue thermostats with digital ones that are around 35% more energy-efficient. It wirelessly links the new temperature-control panels with heating and air-conditioning units, at a cost of around $350 per room. Each room can also be controlled from the front desk. And thanks to the wireless mesh network, the panel in each room also acts as a relay for the data traffic from other rooms back to a central control point.

At a medium-sized office park in Las Vegas, wireless temperature controls were installed in a few buildings containing around 200 offices, says the media-shy maintenance manager (who did not want his or the company's name to be used). Temperatures in the Nevada desert tend to extremes and landlords are responsible for energy bills, so managing a building's climate makes a difference to the bottom line. The new wireless thermostats allow rooms to be controlled centrally on a PC or over the web. The adjustments that tenants themselves are able to make can be controlled too, so that heating or air-conditioning is not used to excess. The system was cheap to put in, mainly because it required very little installation, the manager explains. Tenants are happier and the savings on the energy bills have been considerable, he says; “conservatively 25%”.

25% of a normal energy bill would not make a 350$ per room installation viable, especially when in just a few years, it might drop to something like 50-60$, when mesh networking is all figured out.