This Privacy-Enhanced Computer Display is a nice idea from Mitsubishi. It’s 4 years old, and it’s not clear it ever progressed beyond being an idea.
Thanks to Tom for the link. Oh, and talking of Tom, I found this post pretty memorable reading.
Category Archives: General
Privacy Enhanced Computer Display
Paper comes to life
One of the projects I’m currently working on is Exbiblio. For some time now, the web site has been somewhat vague about what it is we’re actually doing, though it described our general area – making paper more interactive. But over the next few weeks, we plan to release rather more information, and it’s started with the publishing of a whitepaper called ‘The Paper Renaissance’, which you can find at the bottom of this page.
Watch this space…
Curved Space
I know Einstein had a stab at this, but I’m starting to make my own deductions about the non-linearity of space-time. It turns out that walking distance, for example, is dependent on the nature of the environment in which you’re walking.
Strap a rucksack and some walking boots on me, and point me at the open road, and I’ll happily walk fifteen miles. Put me in an art museum, on the other hand, and, though I’ll enjoy the experience almost as much, I’ll want to sit down after a few rooms. Thus we can deduce that Museum Miles are longer than Hiking Miles.
On Saturday I was at IBC – the huge International Broadcasting Convention – at the RAI convention centre in Amsterdam. It was interesting, but I came away absolutely exhausted. Which reminded me of a fact I’d long forgotten: that Trade Show Miles are the longest of all.
Chateau Naughton
Another lovely photo on John’s blog.
1.5 Billion Customers
Apparently there are now 1.5 Billion people using GSM. Wow.
SocialMac
At Foo Camp I wrote about the fact that Mac users seemed to be account for about 50% of the attendees.
I counted here at Our Social World and it’s about 25-30%. The difference is probably partly due to a slightly less techie audience, and partly due to not being on the West Coast, but it’s still well up on the overall Apple market share.
Quickipedia
Tom Coates gave a talk earlier this morning and mentioned that he didn’t have an entry on Wikipedia. By lunchtime, someone in the room had created one for him.
Tom’s from the BBC, is a very nice guy, and has a good blog here, by the way.
VoodooPad
This is just another plug for VoodooPad, one of the Mac apps that has a permanent place in my Dock.
I mentioned it a while ago as a general note-taking utility; I find I haven’t used it very much for that, but there is one situation where it works very well for me; taking notes in conferences. Creating lots of short pages, one for each talk, very easily, finding pictures of the speakers on the net or taking them on a camera as I go along and just dragging them onto the pages, typing in URLs that are mentioned and having them automatically become links. Having just enough text formatting for the task, and so forth – it’s great.
And best of all, it has a Spotlight adaptor which means that I can find any page in any of the documents using Spotlight. This size of page is a good granularity for search results, I find, and yet because I write notes for a whole conference in one file, I don’t need to create lots of little files and think of lots of filenames.
Our Social World
I’m at Our Social World, an interesting conference about blogging and other forms of social networking which also is conveniently within cycling distance of my home.
We were all encouraged to bring laptops and we’re all, of course, being very ‘social’ – IMing each other, posting entries like this, and so forth. It’s bizarre to see posts popping up in my RSS feeds from people just the other side of the room. It’s fun, if you’re at a conference, to type its name in quotes into Technorati. The challenge here is to get the balance between being electronically social and just chatting to the person next to you.
iPod Nano
Like the small size of the iPod shuffle but wish it had a display? Today, Apple announced the iPod Nano, and the Mini has quietly vanished from the Apple site.
Oh, and there’s a Motorola phone with iPod functionality, but we’ve known about that for so long that it would be pretty unexciting even if you could get it from anybody other than Cingular.
It is the only phone I’ve seen with stereo speakers, though!
Definition
from my brother Simon:
Riders of Rohan
A wild and noble people who ride their steeds with pride across the plain, defending their realm against the evil of the two towers, dressed in stylish, light-weight, quick-dry travel wear.
Those not from the UK may be confused : click here
How BitTorrent works
I knew the fundamental idea behind BitTorrent, the file-distribution system – that after some initial seeding every BitTorrent client provides uploads as well as downloads and so you can distribute much more data more quickly without ridiculously heavy loads on one server.
But I’ve just been reading Bram Cohen’s paper and so have a bit more of a grasp of the behind-the-scenes operation, which is really quite clever. Here’s a very simplistic overview:
Files are distributed by creating a .torrent file and putting it on a web server. The .torrent file includes information about the file, its name, length, checksums and so on, and also the URL of a tracker. This is a very simple server which knows abut the machines currently downloading the file (henceforth known as peers). When your client starts downloading a file, it connects to the tracker, gets added to the list, and receives back a random selection of other peers also downloading the file. It can then go off and talk to those peers.
Files are downloaded in pieces, each typically a quarter of a megabyte in size. Your client connects to several peers and finds out from them which pieces of the file they each currently have. It can then start downloading different pieces from different peers; it doesn’t have to get the pieces of the file in order. Whenever you have a complete piece, it’s added to the list of pieces you can make available to others. Often the traffic will be two-way: you’ll be downloading one piece from a peer while uploading a different piece to them.
The overall amount of data downloaded across the system must equal the overall data uploaded – every download has to come from somewhere! So, as a very rough approximation, you can download data as fast as you make it available for upload. This isn’t quite the case, because people often leave their clients running for some time after the download has finished, either because they’re good citizens or because they’re off having a cup of coffee. Others can therefore get more download capacity. Also at particular times, you’ll see the speed of your downloads or uploads fluctuate for a few minutes, though it roughly balances out over time.
A disadvantage of the system as a whole is that if, like many of us, you have a much faster downstream connection than upstream, your bittorrent download is likely to happen at something closer to your slower upstream speed. The advantage, though, is that if the file you’re downloading is at all popular, you’re likely to get it in a much more reliable way than a regular web download, you won’t be limited by the capacity of the originator’s server link, and they won’t end up paying a fortune in bandwidth charges.
There are lots of clever bits which I haven’t touched on here. For example, if you’re connected to several peers, how does your client decide which piece of the file to download next? Answer: it normally downloads the rarest one, the one which fewest of the others have, thus helping to redress the balance. Cute, eh? There’s also stuff related to starting up, to finishing, to finding new peers etc, but for more details have a look at the paper linked to above. All in all, a very nice system.
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