The iPad does not replace my MBP laptop, or even my netbook (Toshiba N205). It’s tasks are very different. It is interesting to note I can use Adobe Flash apps and video on my laptops and netbook, but not the iPod or iPad. During the product introduction it was obvious Flash didn’t work for the video on the front page of the New York Times site. Yet the image of the Times front page on the Apple website shows content were the Flash video would appear. (update)

The name is dreadful. It was bad when Fujitsu used it in 2002. The Hamming distance between iPod and iPad was simply too powerful for marketing. It also plays on the idea that accessories for the iPod should work on the new device. This remains to be seen. (I preferred something more organic, iSlate, perhaps. Though this suffers from the same ‘i-ing’ of nouns.)

Increasingly, and my deepest concern, I feel left out of the loop on this class of devices. (iPod touch, Kindle, Nook, SonyReader, iPad, etc.) I don’t like being relegated to the role of consumer when I want to be a creator. It is almost as if I’m a ‘revenue stream’ first. Kris’ comment ‘designed for consuming, not creating’ hit home with me. That said, if you are looking to consume media, I don’t know why you would buy a Nook or Kindle, if you had a chance to see the iPad.

A killer app for the iPad could be home automation systems, using the ‘pad to control lights, heat & HVAC, A/V, and security (cameras?). Though the lack of multi-tasking limits monitoring capabilities. Touch panel or voice controled lights and heat, family logistics, ‘iPad, set the heat to 68′,’iPad, did we get any mail today?’, ‘iPad, do we need milk?’, ‘iPad, where are all my children?’.

I’m sure the iPad is beautiful and I intend to test is when it becomes available. It is compelling as a multi-touch development platform. Currently I don’t need a bigger iPod, but I might consider replacing my iPod touch with an iPad when the time comes.

I hope this doesn’t herald the end of ownership or the general purpose computer. A future in which I own nothing, but merely rent access. Where is the Terminal.app, rsync, Perl, Ruby? There is nothing raw or vulnerable about this device. My view of the world is limited to what I’m allowed to buy, not what I’m enabled to create. The iPad is a consumer, not a creator device. The expansion of slick, safe, closed systems prevent users from writing their own utilities or solving their own problems. Not all solutions can be downloaded from an app store. Ultimately, the iPad may be too safe for me.

Don’t protect me from myself. Provide the platform and get out of the way.

(See also: apple.com: iPad)
(See also: engadget: Fujitsu and Apple dispute iPad name)

(See also: engadget.com: Apple excises the false flash)

(See also: O’Reilly Radar: The iPad is the iPrius: Your Computer Consumerized)
(See also: New York Times: Will the iPad cause the end of Innovation)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
# Quick and dirty dump and time-stamp of listed MySQL databases.
#
# by Timothy M. Kunau
# Note: There will be a point at which this will run out of diskspace for backs
#       and this script has no way of knowing. There is a companion script 
#       (find one-liner) that iterates through the ARCHIVES and erases files over 
#       a certain number of days old.
#       Assumes 'gzip' and 'mysqldump' are in the PATH.
#
#       Admittedly a bit fast and loose with variables and system returns. 
#       It might also be more useful if you could simply pass in the database name
#       as a variable.
#       These, and numerous other improvements, are left as an exercise for the reader.
 
my $workingdir = "/tmp";
my $host       = "localhost";
my $username   = "root";
my $pw         = "THE_ROOT_PASSWORD_FOR_YOUR_MYSQL_INSTANCE_GOES_HERE";
#
# Add a database you want to backup by name to the @dbs array below:
my @dbs        = qw{ hapmap_human concrete gallery2 wordpress };
 
###############  Nothing should need to change beyond this point.
 
# Create a $TIMESTAMP for log entry.
sub get_date {
   # brute force method
 
   my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime(time);
 
   if ($year < 10) { $year = "0$year"; }
   $year = $year + 1900;
   if ($mday < 10) { $mday = "0$mday"; }
   if ($hour < 10) { $hour = "0$hour"; }
   if ($min < 10) { $min = "0$min"; }
   if ($sec < 10) { $sec = "0$sec"; }
 
   # Format a $TIMESTAMP for easy sorting
   $monthord = $mon + 1;
   if ($monthord < 10) { $monthord = "0$monthord"; }
   $TIMESTAMP = "$year$monthord$mday$hour$min$sec";
}
 
####
 
# generate TIMESTAMP
&get_date;
 
foreach $db (@dbs) {
 
    # dump databse
    system("mysqldump --flush-logs --opt --host=$host --user=$username --password=$pw $db > $workingdir/$db-$TIMESTAMP.dmp");
 
    # compress dump file to save space
    system("gzip $workingdir/$db-$TIMESTAMP.dmp");
 
}
 
exit;

A simple place to begin, if you are looking for a script to backup your chosen MySQL databases. The code was written years ago and has been in production ever since. I haven’t had the chance or need to change it.

Suggestions for improvement are listed in the code. Please post your solutions in the comments.

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(See also: lipsum.com)

“Rhonda“, a 3D drawing tool developed by Amit Pitaru circa 2003.

(See also: Rhonda Project)
(See also: pitaru: sonic sculpture)
(See also: Drawn: Drawing in 3D with Rhonda)
(See also: The Rotten Fruit Tardis)
(See also: bitforms)

According to the NEBULA website:

The fully-integrated nature of the NEBULA components provides for extremely rapid development of policy-compliant and secure web applications, fosters and encourages code reuse, and improves the coherence and cohesiveness of NASA’s collaborative web applications. It is used for Education and Public Outreach, for collaboration and public input, and also for mission support.

NEBULA extends the Software-as-a-Service to the realm of Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. In the process, slaying several classic conundrums of computational collaboration.

I wish them the best of luck.

(See also: NEBULA site)
(See also: InformationWeek: NASA Launches Nebula Compute Cloud)
(See also: Open Eucalyptus project)
(See also: Eucalyptus Cloud Computing presentation)

It’s been an interesting evening while Stephen Wolfram launches his new computational knowledge engine ‘WolframAlpha‘. There were some fits and starts, but I have been able to ask it some interesting questions.

The approach reminds me of Thinking Machines Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) and Gopher from the late 1980′s. I know that Stephen Wolfram worked at Thinking Machines and I don’t know if he was involved with the WAIS project, but it certainly was a fundamental influence on WolframAlpha. WAIS was ultimately sold to AOL in 1995, just as the World Wide Web was forming.

WolframAlpha is easily stumped. But then you ask it a question that fans out into an amazing array of results from wide and varied data sources. TEDChris has side by side comparison of seven queries given to WolframAlpha and Google. A helpful illustration of the differences between the two philosophies. When the answer isn’t a precise number, WolframAlpha will try to reduce the question to something it can answer precisely. If the answer is a precise or computed number WolframAlpha can produce an elegant and concise response, though much of the supporting data appears to be older sources than those revealed in similar Google searches. While powerful in certain domains (such as math, chemistry, census data), the result is a service that may produce what you need or nothing useful at all. Here are some funny queries of interest:

There is a certain level of hubris in the idea all knowledge can be contained, maintained, and computed centrally. WolframAlpha is a ‘come to the mountain’ experience. In contrast, Google’s shotgun response relies on the distributed nature of the internet, counting and weighing the edges between ideas, often responding with a myriad of links relying on the user to be the final filter.

Both systems have a place in my toolbox.

(See also: WolframAlpha: query interface)
(See also: Introducing WolframAlpha)
(See also: WAIS: Wide Area Information Server)
(See also: TEDChris: WolframAlpha vs Google)
(See also: TechCrunch: Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed)

Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey conceived and executed a project to assemble 2000 human voices to sing “Daisy Bell”. Tasks were distributed using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and samples were assembled and animated using the Processing language.

“Daisy Bell” was composed by Harry Dacre in 1892 and begins with the line “Daisy, Daisy/Give me your answer do/I’m half crazy/all for the love of you”. The song itself is significant since it was the first song a computer was taught to sing at IBM labs in 1962. The song received further geek credibility when it was performed by the fictional computer HAL 9000 in Arthur C. Clark’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The musical result is less joyful than strangely haunting. The technical result is an interesting illustration of collaboration and aggregation.

(See also: Bicycle built for 2000)

The Social Collider maps cross-connections between conversations on Twitter.

With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter. One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that didn’t resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.

The Social Collider is meant to be an instrument which can make visible the creation of memes and their propagation.

Get project status updates on Twitter: @socialcollider

(See also: socialcollider.net)

#!/usr/bin/perl
 
use LWP::UserAgent;
 
my $output = shift @ARGV;
my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json';
 
#print "Verify Credentials\n";
$browser->credentials('twitter.com:80', 'Twitter API', 'TWTR_ACCNT', 'TWTR_PSWD');
$response = $browser->get("http://twitter.com/account/verify_credentials.json");
 
#print $response->code."  ".$response->message."\n";
#print "Update\n";
 
my $response = $browser->post($url, {status => $output});
#print $response->code."  ".$response->message."\n";

The only magic is the LWP::UserAgent module.

When you run it from the command line, the only argument is the status update to Twitter. This could be useful for programatic updates to Twitter from devices or monitoring services. The script is easily modified to support account information from the command-line, but this would appear in a process list on a shared machine and would be a security risk. Industrial strength applications would require connection validation.

% tweet.pl tweet_message_of_140_chars_or_fewer

I’m writing a home security application based on this idea.

What will you do with Twitter on the command-line?

(See also: twitter.com)
(See also: Twitter API Wiki)
(See also: perl.org)

Tivo has made it very easy to time shift programming, watching WHAT we want WHEN we want. A simple hack to the remote allows you to skip through ads, leaving only programming. Timely and efficient. As an owner, I find I watch less TV and never turn it on to watch live. Time is too precious.

It now is possible, with free tools (listed below) to automate transferring HD television shows from a network attached Tivo to a Macintosh, remove the advertising, and transfer them back to the Tivo for viewing.

With these tools, I may have killed any commercial motivation for development and production of television programming. Television is dead and we killed it.

(See also: iTivo: a Mac front-end to your Series 2, Series 3, and TiVoHD device. It can download shows from your tivo to your computer.)
(See also: pytivoX: lets you transfer your media files from your mac to your tivo.)