I know I haven't used this blog in a long time but I finally have a project worth putting here. Unfortunately it's difficult to explain. I'm building a desk. A dark wood desk with a pane of glass flush with a wood border. The top will look something like this:
The glass will be more opaque though and the top will be thicker. And hollow. And filled with LED's. Think something like around 1:50 in this video:

In order to accomplish this I've had to go back to my high school physics lessons and get together a ragtag group of friends. David Marks, master carpenter:
Vaheed, electrical engineer without peer:
And myself, supplier of money and abuser of friends. Vaheed and I spent a few hours tonight figuring out exactly what we wanted to do as well as going over the basics of circuits and controllers. We ended up with 2 pages of diagrams and some math problems and a much clearer idea of what we were talking about. More importantly, we're now both on the same page as far as understanding what needs to happen. Here are a couple of pictures of the papers we were working on:



Now I'm going to go to sleep so I can be awake at 7am for breakfast and 8am for work. Expect another update after breakfast.

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I discovered last.fm!
I integrated it with Amarok!
I might be going to CES 07!
Take that!

I.
Hate.
Macs.

I hate them I hate them I hate them and there's nothing you can do to convince me otherwise Mr. Jobs. What's that you say? You have a superior operating system? True you do, but at what price? Do you have a terminal like in Linux? A command prompt like in Windows? Or do you sacrifice customizability and control for the sake of making things Just Work? No thank you, Mr. Jobs, I am a power user. Come back to me when you have something better to show me.

Hello again, Mr. Jobs. Have you finally come to terms with the fact that you will never have me as a customer? No? What's all this fluff you're going on about? Intel processors? And a superior operating system? But my dear Mr. Jobs, you forget the fact your operating system is still less customizable than Windows (with all its flaws). I also am a Windows programmer. I require Windows for my livelihood, not only for development tools but for many other programs that have no Mac version. What do you say to that? Boot Camp? What is this nonesense? Boot... Windows? Natively? On a Mac? I don't understand... that's impossible. It can't be real. And even if it is, do you have a Media Center? Can I watch TV on a MacBook? FrontRow? A media center interface? Mac Mini? Please Mr. Jobs, please stop. Do not reduce me to begging. You win, you win. Please, tell me where I can find such an awesome system? Forgive me for my evil, unenlightened ways and show me the light. What? any of over 300 apple stores liberally spread across the United States, Japan and the UK? Please Mr. Jobs, show me the alter where I may sacrifice my first born to you as thanks for the wonderful bounty you have given me.

I figure since no one actually reads this, I'm safe posting it here :-)

The telecommunication revolution is upon us and I am excited. Generally, 'telecommunication revolution' is just a buzzword used by people trying to hide the fact that they don't know what they're talking about. Since I don't want to be one of those people I'm going to use an actual concrete example to explain what I mean by it. My parents have volunteered to be used as a test case for whatever new internet/land line phone/cell phone solutions I can come up with. The only stipulation is that it has to save them money, a fact which I think makes them a very good test case. There are lots of internet and phone providers, people aren't scared to switch between them so this isn't a Microsoft Office situation where users are so used to only one system that they can't fathom not having their current one (I'll send you a Word file). What will entice people to switch is comporable service for a better price which is exactly what my parents are after. Right now they pay $100/month for cell service and they get 1000 minutes and three lines. DSL internet service is another $30/month and requires a land-line. That land line is $50/month and quickly becoming obsolete under the burden of a $100/month cell phone bill (The logic there is 'why not get 1500 minutes/month on my cell phone for an extra $10-15 and drop the land line?'). The reason the land line is still there is for the DSL. My parents came to me with this setup and asked me to decrease their costs without losing a significant portion of their current services.

The first step in that process is to get rid of the DSL line and replace it with a cable line. The probable provider of this line would be Time Warner (I just got off the phone with them). While I'm not a fan of AOL at all, the pricing is good and the service appears comparable. The Time Warner plan would cover cable internet access and a digital phone service. Two of the major perks of Time Warner are the lack of contracts and the price. With my current plan I'm locked into a year long contract and can't do anything else until that ends. The phone service from Time Warner is at least comparable if not better (unlimited minutes, anywhere in the United States, no extra fees from the phone company although I'd still have to pay taxes) and the internet access would be at least as fast and let me get rid of the land line. The great part about all this is the price point: Both services, bundled together would cost less than $75. Actual approximations put it much closer to $70, but we're being conservative here.

This is a good first step in the right direction. Some of the major benefits are: no fee to cancel, slightly less expensive service, no need for a land line and a relatively easy install path (inexpensive or waived setup fees). Where I'd like to do my major saving is in the cell phone. $100/month is a lot of money and with the continued development and use of WiFi (and other, larger scale wireless internet options) and VoIP, my best case scenario is to end my current cell phone contract, buy three WiFi phones and use them all over my internet connection. I think that that is slowly becoming more of a reality but only time will tell for sure if such a service will ever exist. I believe that at the very least much less expensive cell phone service will become an option. Now if only I could get my crystal 8 ball working to know when the right time to jump on the bandwagon is...

I've done it. I've moved my computer over to Linux, the Ubuntu distribution to be exact. While there are hurldes to face, I'm working on getting over them. The process will go much faster once I get my wireless card working a la ndiswrapper. After that I have to figure out how to get digital sound output for my speakers and then get nvidia's linux driver. Once all that gets done I should be in pretty good shape. Of course, now I can't install VS '05 for my computer graphics class... but I'll burn that bridge when I get to it. For now, I have happily left Windows behind. If anybody else wants to try installing Ubuntu I have my CD and a lot of freshly gained experience with common configuration problems.

I just created a /. account a few days ago, and today, I was moderated for the first time. I got a +1 along with an 'Insightful' modifier. If you're interested, here's the comment I left. I plan on being on /. a lot now.

Thanks to Evan Langinger, I just discovered Writely, an amazing peice of web based software used to create, store and share documents over the internet. There are lots of different paradigms surfacing right now, and I'm wondering which one everybody thinks will take the cake, whether it's the web based paradigm exemplified by companies and products such as Google and Writely. Nevermind, I just remembered Hegels dialectic. I think that smaller devices, such as smart phones which can already access the internet will continue to become more and more advanced and will eventually be able to load their entire (smaller than desktop) operating systems from the internet and everybody will be able to load their lives onto such a device: their address books, important documents. And the bluetooth capabilities of such devices mean that information would be instantly transferable from one device to another, or from a presentation based device (such as a projector). The only things I don't see having a place in this new system are complicated programs for creating content (3ds, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro). But maybe there will be a gap between normal computing devices for the consumer, who has no need to create such content, and professional computers that will have that ability. And honestly, everything really heavy duty that I can think of has to do with graphics. I believe that compilers could be used over the web, html pages are just text, word documents will become Open Document Files, which is already an xml based format, perfect for transport over the internet. And most importantly, I see all this happening in the next decade.

Exciting

Test Document

So this is what an online text editor looks like. I think that this is the future. We'll have a ton of completely inexpensive dumb terminals whose only basic functionality is to connect to the internet and load an operating system from a server. The necessary speed is almost here, and pretty soon all but some of the most intense functionality will be able to be loaded remotely, like this. It would be pretty easy to put OpenOffice on the internet, and then just have people load and use it from there. If people only stored on their hard drives the actual files they use (and even that might be unecessary), and loaded all of their programs remotely, then for the casual user, a labtop (what's the point in having a desktop computer if all you're doing is connecting to the internet?) could be brought down in price to $100 or less without having to sacrifice computer power.

Now, I'm going to invite Evan to join me on this document just to test that feature out. Enjoy Evan. I hope you used your gmail address to set up your account here 'cause that's where I'm sending this.

Work is... interesting. I enjoy being on computers all day, but I miss the lack of freedom. Fortunately I've been getting a lot done. You can check it out here, if you'd like. I'd be interested to hear anybodys feedback. I like this job, although I'm looking more forward to getting paid than anything else.

Today I started researching VoIP, which for the non-nerds out there stands for Voice over Internet Protocol and basically is a method of talking (as opposed to typing) with people over the internet. It's a pretty great technology, implemented incredibly well in GoogleTalk. I also found out that AIM and GoogleTalk are going to be interoperable (and it only cost Google $1,000,000,000). GoogleTalk will also be coming out with an updated version that supports buddy icons (and possibly emoticons?). We'll just have to wait and see, but I'm excited. MSN is also buying Yahoo Messenger, and it looks like battle lines are being drawn in the IM wars. I know which side I'm on. Do you?