Category Archives: technology

Ordered Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11

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You think computers strain your eyes, you should see what they can do to wrists. Or vocal cords… Unless you use Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software from Nuance.

Amazon.com has helpfully informed me in several mails over the last couple of weeks: Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 is coming! This may not be exciting news to you, but perhaps it ought to be. Among technologies available to the public, this is one of those that come closest to science fiction. Basically, you dictate to the computer or even give its orders by voice instead of keyboard and mouse.

For me, there is a more personal reason also. Back when my wrist hurt so much that I had to seriously consider whether I could continue working, Dragon NaturallySpeaking was one of the things that saved my health and my job. Possibly the most important thing, although more physical exercise also helped turn the tide.

Ironically, starting around that time I began to experience problems with my vocal cords. After many years of mostly silence, and a gradual change in lung function, I can no longer speak as much as I want. Luckily, the latest versions of Dragon NaturallySpeaking are able to take dictation even when I speak quite softly, more softly than I can do at work. In a manner of speaking, speaking to my computer is now better than speaking to a human.

The reviews I have read all agree that NaturallySpeaking 11 does not quite deserve its number: It is more like 10.5, there is nothing really revolutionary. The user interface has supposedly been improved, both visually and with new voice commands that are more intuitive to use. Accuracy is supposedly improved by 15%, and the program learns faster, both from the corrections you make and from ordinary use as it gets familiar with your vocabulary. This sounds like a good idea: version 10 has an unfortunate tendency to write “naked” instead of “native”, and sometimes also “breasts” in stead of “breath”. I like to think that would go away if it became familiar with my vocabulary!

There is also another practical reason why I would want the new version. The old one only works on one of my computers, the one that broke down in November and that I repaired again in February. The new version also works on 64 bits operating systems, including Vista and Windows 7. This should cover my needs for the next few years, if any, regardless of what happens to my old Windows XP computer.

This entry was dictated with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, so it isn’t all that bad. I hope to give you my personal experience with the new program sometime next month. In the meantime, you might want to save up money if you are interested and don’t live in Norway where even common people have plenty of money. And not only they, but even I. Or at least I can afford $100 to have my computer understand me better than a human…

Webthink vs bookthink

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Search the net with the click of a mouse! It is almost too easy…

So there has been some worry about how the web influences our thinking. Not just the content of our thoughts – actually, with Google at hand, we probably think a little more factually where we used to be guesstimating – but the WAY we think.  Studies show that people don’t read more than a few paragraphs. For instance, statistically you probably don’t read this entry to the end, at least if I provide a link somewhere before that.

In the past, people read books, so the theory goes. Books are deeeep. They let you immerse yourself in the narrative, build a grand cathedral of interrelated facts (or fiction, as the case may be), with many relationships knit together, thorough analysis and a span of time.  What is not to love? But now, people click the first link they see, and if they see a block of text filling the whole screen, they press backspace.

The idea is that people are starting to do this in the rest of their life too.  Certainly newspaper and magazines are starting to include highlights and fact boxes for those who can’t take the time to read the whole article. Who is to say that we are not adopting the same attitude in human relationships.

Don’t worry about that last part, say I.  Most people were always going on tangents anyway. Besides, the few who could follow a long narrative during a conversation, were the ones who followed their own, regardless of what everyone else was talking about.

And seriously, which came first, the hyperlink or the the remote TV control?  Even though many TV channels already look like someone is clicking frenetically on the remote, with random changes of angles, colors, faces and scenes, people STILL click the remote anyway. Because they can.

The books, I give you the point.  But take a trip to the nearest book kiosk and look at what kind of books they sell, and which of these again people actually buy.  Murder mysteries and Harlequin romance. And even then, people read them on the plane, subway, doctor’s waiting room or wherever they don’t have anything else to do and people would look strangely at them if they touched themselves.

There may be some who used to read War and Peace and now are unable to read more than a couple paragraphs.  That is worrying. (They should also see a doctor and get tested if they are 40 or above, Alzheimer’s is a terrible and creeping illness.) As for my humble self, people I have met on the net – like Carl McColman, Robert W Godwin, Ryuho Okawa – have made me not only return to books, but start to build a library of timeless wisdom instead of the hundreds of fantasy and sci-fi books I used to have.

You have to take responsibility for your actions.  But at least now you have more chances to learn things from cultures far from your own, geographically or in thoughtspace. If that is what you want. Or you could read numerous explanations of why George Bush is the Antichrist and will return to imperil us all once again.  It is up to you, really. You could even log off and read a good book.

But if you just did that, you would miss out on your reward! A link! Click it click it click it! The Last Psychiatrist – whose irony, wit and clarity of thought surpass even my own! (You know how hard that can be… but then again, you are not reading the rest of the entry after the link, so I can write whatever I want here.)

Unimaginably much information

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You may well stare: The rise and fall of entire civilizations could be contained within that computer!

“There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003,” says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing.”

Few people in the world are better placed to feel the pulse of information flow than Schmidt, so I’ll take him on face value regarding the facts.  When he uses the expression “dawn of civilization”, it means he is not just talking about the Internet.  From clay tablets to newspapers and advertising fliers, everything is in there. Presumably also music cassettes, CD’s, movie reels and DVDs as well. Exabytes are unbelievably large: One quintillion bytes, or about 50 000 years of DVD-quality video.

Most of the new information is probably irrelevant or erroneous. For instance, over 90% of e-mail traffic is spam. (Microsoft says 97%, most other sources are lower though.) But Google is pretty good at filtering those:  Looking over the spam folder, which contains 30 days of spam, I found only one legitimate message, and it was a rather unimportant one, from a mailing list I’m on.  Likewise, I have had one spam-mail delivered in my inbox over the last month. Not perfect, but nearly so.

Twitter is a good example of the next level of “random” data: Even after you have subtracted the spammers, the relevance of what is left varies, to say the least. On my Twitter feed I get words of wisdom that will be valid and valuable as long as humans are humans. I also get product launches, and friends griping about their computer games and telling me what they have for dinner. Twitter is badly in need of tagging, but does not have it.

Modern blogs, on the other hand, have tagging.  However, it is often only available for those who write the blog, and their concepts may be different from yours.  Most notably, one person’s religion is another person’s superstition. In America in particular, one person’s political view is another person’s clinical insanity.

Even without using tags, though, Eric Schmidt boasts: “Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are.” That is an average, obviously. But more and more of the online content is photographs or even movies. Schmidt’s comment also puts Google Street View is a slightly different light…

Much of the new content is neither text nor pictures nor sound, but abstract data like information from cash registers, car counting devices etc. These seem utterly impersonal at the moment, but it may not always remain so. As the net of data grows ever finer, it becomes possible to track the individual whether he wants it or not. In fact, I would say that trying to retain anonymity in this age is like walking into a bank wearing a mask and gloves.  You will stand out as a shadow on the data:  This customer always pays with cash, does not wear a connected mobile phone, avoids buildings with video surveillance… there may already be government agencies looking out for such a pattern.

Now – what will YOU do with the world’s information when Google puts it in your hand and says “Here, take this!”?

***

(I picked up the quote from an article on ReadWriteWeb: Google CEO Schmidt: “People aren’t ready for the technology revolution”. They have some interesting information on that site, by the way. You may want to bookmark it for a rainy day.)

100 times stronger

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No, it won’t break, unless you also have grown 100 times stronger over the last decade. But a decade from now, it may break your mind…

No, this is not a spiritual entry, although I hope that one day I may be able to write such an entry with that title… Rather it is about a more down to earth science. 100 times is how much more powerful a computer is today than 10 years ago.

Moore’s Law implies that the capacity of computers doubles every 18 months. That might sound impressive, but perhaps not astounding. To astonishment comes when we realize that the doubling is doubling again after another year and a half, and so on. This amounts to approximately an order on magnitude — a factor of 10 — every five years. And five years is a period of time most of us can remember pretty well, if we set our minds to it.

In other words, the average computer five years ago was 10 times weaker than today. So, what difference has this made in our lives?

At first, you probably think like I did: “Nothing at all.” I mean, five years ago I was writing my journal, surfing the web, and playing City of Heroes and The Sims 2. That is what I still do, so what happened to the revolution?

Well, for one thing, five years ago I did not have YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter. And especially not on my mobile phone.  My mobile phone had something like twenty grainy characters in its display, and was used for talking. Actually it was barely used at all, because even then I did not talk if I could avoid it, more or less. But you get the point.

So mobile phones have basically become computers. How about the computers? Well, I am still playing The Sims 2 and City of Heroes, but with much more content, faster and with more detail on a larger screen, with a cheaper computer.

Five years ago, streaming video over the Internet was still experimental, and not reliable for most of us. There were services offering such an experience, but the movies tended to be small and grainy and you might still not be able to complete them without pauses or without the whole process breaking down. Today, streaming video is trivial for many of us.. though not all, as this depends on the communications infrastructure (copper cables, fiber or wireless network) in the area.

Five years ago, speech recognition was still not something I could recommend unless you were seriously disabled. I used it occasionally because of the wrist pain, but not for long, because of the high error rate.  Today, it is only marginally worse than dictating to a well educated human. But it still requires a fairly strong computer. It is not like you can dictate reliably to your netbook or mobile phone (although Google’s Nexus One made a decent attempt).

Your computing experience will vary:  A friend of mine is using the same computer and mobile phone as five years ago.  On the other hand of the spectrum, if I had bought a high-end video card, I would be able to run even modern games like Age of Conan at full tilt.  (This online game is not recommended due to its evil atmosphere, but as a demonstration of what computers can do in terms of lifelike video, it is possibly second only to Crysis.)

If I go another five years back in my journal archive, I come to the age of The Sims 1 and the tail end of the life of Daggerfall.  Both of these games look decidedly long in the tooth.  For Daggerfall this is to be expected, as it was released in August 1996.  But The Sims was the hit game of the year 2000, and I made comments about how it caused my computer to grow hot. The amazingly lifelike pictures and behavior of the small people in the game was a marvel.  Yet today they strike us as simplistic in body and mind, merely a prelude to the more realistic later iterations.

Back in 2000, I was still waiting for the broadband, and had to pay “through the nose” or “an arm and a leg” (not literally) for slow dial-up access to the Internet.  Going online was not something to undertake trivially: One time I got into one of the earliest online games, I ended up with a bill I just barely was able to work off without hurting my credit.

The grainy Japanese cartoons I downloaded occasionally back then took overnight to download, if I succeeded at all. Still, I was impressed at the time that it was even possible. From across the globe, at that! This newfangled “Internet” thing sure was amazing!

***

I don’t really think we are getting 100 times more effect out of our computers than in the year 2000.  Some of the raw power is lost in sloppy programming. It is a fact that programming is still more of an art than just plain production, and a good programmer can still run rings around a large team of mediocre programmers. In fact, if the team gets large enough, it may start performing worse and worse.  But thanks to ever faster computer, it is no longer necessary to optimize your code. As long as it does what you want, even if it uses an ineffective way to get there, you are good to go. After all, in a year and a half it will run twice as fast again.

But a lot really has happened, and some of it is like science fiction come true:  A computer taking dictation like a secretary, or a cell phone performing the functions that had required a computer only a few years ago. Actually, the ability to stream music from the sky with a choice between millions of tracks, is literally taken from one of my science fiction novel attempts approximately 20 years ago. Today I can do this on my cell phone, at high quality and barely noticeable cost.

So what will the computers of 2015 or 2020 bring, if we manage to not blow up the planet before that?

My best guess today would be that computing will go further mobile over the next five years. The cell phone of 2015 will probably take dictation much like my home computer does today. The screen resolution will also be much higher than today, although I don’t think it is practical to have a screen resolution comparable to today’s home computers. It will likely have handwriting recognition for those situations where you don’t want to speak out loud, although on-screen keyboards will be more popular since they will be pretty much typo proof.

I honestly cannot predict the computer of 2020. I believe computers will be embedded in most everyday things, so if will be perfectly normal to talk to your stereo or your TV and expect them to react accordingly. Not to mention your car, which may or may not drive on its own for the most part. Mobile phones will likely be able to translate between most of the world’s national languages, written or spoken.

But when it comes to computer games, online or off-line (if such a distinction is even meaningful anymore)… I have no idea what the future will bring, when computers are 100 times stronger than today.

Linux on a stick

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This may not be as interesting as multidimensional spirituality, but it may be useful to some people for a few years. Of course, the world of computing changes so fast that this will have no lasting value. But then again few things have in this world.

Recently, the first reasonably fast USB memory sticks (memory keys) arrived. Before, it had been a handy but slow medium. And the capacity was not much to write home about either. Recently, we have got much bigger memory keys, and then we got a breakthrough in speed as well. The 16 GB Transcend JetFlash 600 dual-channel memory stick is noticeably faster, especially noticeable in writing speed, which is traditionally a bottleneck with flash storage. Actually, it is still a bottleneck, but it is a wider bottleneck than before. It is not all that useful to have a large memory that you have to leave overnight to finish writing.

With its speed and capacity, this was ideal for my experiment: To install Linux on a memory stick. I had already made a small (2GB is small these days!) boot key with Ubuntu 9.10, the most recent complete version. There is a new version in beta, it should be official any day now, but it was in beta while I tested this. Since it is still planned for release in April, it is called Ubuntu 10.04 (the format is year.month). I have tried both of these.

I started with 9.10. I already had this installed on one computer, and it includes a tool that lets you make bootable memory sticks. These work like boot CDs, except they don’t need a CD-ROM. This is handy with the new ultra-small computers, netbooks. (It won’t help with iPad, though, since it does not even have USB.)

So I first made a boot disk / installer on the small, slow key. Then I used that to install Ubuntu Linux, but to the Transcend instead of to the main hard disk. Both of the USB flash drives were on an Acer Aspire One, which is one of the earliest and weakest netbooks around. It does not even have a hard disk, only a flash disk, and a rather small one at that. Not having a hard disk or a CD-ROM saves a lot of battery power and weight, since there are no engines to spin, or moving parts at all. And since it already uses a flash disk, flash USB should not make that much of a difference.

It did not, at first. When I chose at startup to boot from the Transcend, it took a little longer to boot, but it was still tolerable. And once it was up and running, I could have a couple programs open simultaneously, like listening to music while surfing the web. The test seemed to be a success.

Seemed to. Having tested it with Ubuntu 9.10, I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04. It was in alpha 2 at the time, a very early stage, even though the release was only weeks away. They sure have confidence. Of course, as with any large piece of software, it is sure to get a flurry of patches when a large number of people start using it for real purposes. With computer games, we call this phase “paid beta”, but Ubuntu (like most other Linux distributions) is actually free, despite the huge work that goes into it. Even so, if you are vaguely nervous around computers, you should wait 3-6 months after a new release before upgrading. With me it is the other way around, of course: I upgrade before it is even in beta.

It was fairly stable, although the new features related to social media crashed every day. This may have been because I ran it from a USB memory key on a machine that was weak even when it was first released to the market, but which I bought when it was already long in the tooth, and that again was a year or two ago. Ubuntu makes no pretense at being super fast – that’s its little brother Xubuntu. So it seems one of the programs was terminated when it did not load within a certain time, which had been decided by the programmers with no regard for extreme cases like my setup. This was later fixed, but there were still a couple related programs that crashed. Of course, the program was still not finished at the time. It is still not released as I write this, the final date is April 29.

Whatever the case, apart from having to start the gwibber (social media client) manually, it worked OK. Except that it grew slower and slower with each passing day. Then again each passing day saw me download perhaps a hundred or so updates to various and sundry programs and functions. I assume this was what slowed it down somehow, but I can think of no logical mechanism by which that would happen. Unlike a hard disk, fragmentation has no effect on flash drives. They don’t have a moving head – like the needle of an old gramophone – moving from place to place on the platter, like hard disks do. Solid state drives may write more slowly, but their read speed is unmatched. It probably reads as fast as the USB port and the processor can take it. Or should have.

I still don’t know. I know that when I took the stick to the HP Mini 2 (with 2GB RAM instead of 0.5 GB) it ran fast enough again. Unfortunately, after I installed that day’s updates, something went horribly wrong. It worked fine afterwards, but the next time I tried to start, it did not run on either the Acer or the HP. It did not even get so far that I could diagnose it and learn what was wrong. So I wiped it clear, installing 9.10 from start again.

I have upgraded it again, which took several hours as almost every part of the operating system was modified, or so it seemed. After this it runs fine again. I mean, it runs really well for a machine that is just barely more than a toy. Right now I have Opera running with 3 tabs, one of which plays streaming music. I also have a Terminal window open (same as a dos prompt in Windows) and the Ubuntu Software center where you can download innumerable programs for free. I am also in editing mode in an OpenOffice Writer document (roughly equivalent to Microsoft Word) and have open a movie player that has finished playing an Xvid movie that is stored on an external hard disk on my old Xubuntu machine. So that machine streams it over the local network to the USB stick on the netbook, which plays it. I played the movie with all these same programs open, except I did of course not stream music in Opera while playing the movie. There were a few cases of stuttering now and then through the movie when played in fullscreen mode, but not enough to make it unwatchable by any means.

The one thing I can’t do with it is install new programs in the background while working. But this is most likely due to the weak processor. In conclusion, it works quite well – as long as it does not suddenly crash forever, like it did last time. You should not overload it with a large number of open programs on a machine with little memory though. Writing to flash memory is much slower than reading, and if the system needs to swap memory to the stick constantly it will slow down, even with a Transcend JetFlash.

Technobabble day!

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To the left, the repaired computer. To the right, the one I have used since December 2.  In the foreground, the broken power supply unit.

Today, dear reader, I want to babble about computers and software.  It will get geeky. You are not obliged to read if it makes your eyes go round and round.  The good news is that my best computer is back up and running and I can talk to it. The rest is optional.

So let us start with the high point of the day.  On December 2 this winter, my best computer, Terra the Quad-Core, crashed overnight. I decided then and there to not try to send it for repairs.  Not only does it hold private stuff, but there is also the point that it is really heavy.  I literally almost killed myself getting it home, except an old friend suddenly showed up like an angel and drove me and it most of the way.   The post office at Holum is at least three times as far away from home.  Besides, I am not sure if it was still under warranty after 2 years and 2 weeks. If not, it could easily become expensive.  Even if it was, the cost of freight would go a long way towards just buying a new power supply and replace it myself.

But I did not actually do that until just recently.  I was busy with moving, but mostly I had opened it and looked at the many wires crisscrossing and  connecting here and there.  Could I recreate that without an actual job training in computer repair?  I was not at all sure.

But then one day I got a mail from Multicom, the company that sold it to me. Although this is a machine with Windows (one of the last desktops with Windows XP, intentionally since Vista was much slower and had other problems while new) … As I said, although this was a Windows machine, my loyalty to Multicom is partly because they habitually sell computers without operating system, so you can install Linux on them for free.  This is rare here in Norway, which is a very Windows-dominated country.  People here have lots of money, so free software is not as popular as elsewhere.  I want to support companies that break with the Microsoft-Apple duopoly.  So I subscribe to their customer mail happily.  This time they had a 650 W power supply on sale.

“Even if it should turn out not to be the power supply” I said to myself, “I still have the Oblivion computer lacking nothing but a strong power supply to come alive with one of my 3 precious MS Office licenses and one of my 5 precious iTunes licenses, plus some data I had added since the last backup. So it would not be all in vain.”

It was the power supply.  I fetched it yesterday at the Joker convenience store, which happens to also be the post office, although they hide it well.  They even don’t have a sign with their name (Holum Nærkjøp) which the post office uses when sending the collect slip.  I actually spent some time looking for that other nonexistent shop.  But eventually I asked them and got my package.  In addition to the power supply, I had bought a fast 16 GB Transcend JetFlash 600 memory stick. This dual-channel stick is quite a bit faster than the industry standard, yet works plug & play in any USB 2.0 connector. Whee!

Actually, I took that first.  I had used a cheap, slower 2 GB USB memory key and converted it to a startup unit for Ubuntu Linux.  When I boot from that, it acts like the install CD, except it also has some extra storage to save settings and a few extra programs like the Opera web browser. Unfortunately, it does not have enough memory to install language files, because once I did, it decided on its own to unpack OpenOffice in pretty much every western language and perhaps some more.  I did this several times over the past week, each time crashing the key to the point where it had to be formatted anew.

This time I used the small key to install Linux on the big, fast key.  It worked quite fine, although of course it took some time.  I can now use this install of Linux on any computer that lets me boot off a USB key.  The one I had in mind however was the cheap little Acer Aspire One that I bought last year (at which point I broke a tooth).  This little thing comes with its own excessively user friendly version of Linux, but it is quite restricted compared to Ubuntu. Besides, I am used to Ubuntu. There has been rapid progress in Solid State Disks since then, but the Aspire One I got has actually noticeably less disk space than the USB key!

After installing and checking out, and downloading a couple favorite programs, I decided to upgrade the Transcend key to Ubuntu 10.04 (nickname “Lucid Lynx”) which is supposed to come out this April.  I was mildly surprised to see that it was still in Alpha 2, less than two months before release.  10.04 is a Long Term Support version, and these tend to have less focus on innovation and more on stability. I wonder how stable they can get it if they aren’t even ready for beta by now.  We’ll see, they usually make it somehow.

The upgrade was actually much slower than the initial install.  It told me it would take 8-9 hours.  I eventually left it on overnight, but it stopped with a question some 7 hours into the process, so it was still not finished this morning.  It did finish, however.

I was not pleased. They had for some reason decided to change the buttons at the top right of each window, the ones you use to minimize, maximize or close the window. These were moved to the top LEFT corner, and minimize and maximize were swapped around, while close was still the rightmost of the three, not the cornermost. They also had made them into small circles instead of squares, although this can be changed simply by switching to one of the other built-in themes, or download a new.  I spent probably a quarter of an hour before I found that I had to edit it with the gconf-editor. To the best of my knowledge that is not in the start menus, so I typed its name in a terminal window. Actually I first ran it as sudo, which meant the settings only applied to programs opened as superuser, not very useful.  Anyway I eventually got it right, opening ->apps ->metacity ->general ->button_layout and changing the line there to swap around minimize and maximize and move the colon to the front.  The colon symbolizes the divide between the left and right top corners, so any buttons placed before the colon appear on the left, anything after the colon appears to the right. Yes, if you are insane you can have buttons on both sides, but even Mac does not have that. I think.

That was that really, but seriously? You don’t kill holy cows, you milk them.  This placement has been industry standard for 30 years or so.  I am pretty sure it was in the top right corner on GEM, an operating system for home gaming machines back when the z80 processor was the way of the future and PacMan was state of the art video gaming.  I would not mind if they asked during setup where I wanted my buttons to be, or if it was an easy-to-find setting in the menus.  I might even have ignored it if it only showed up on new installations and did not mess with existing machines that were just being upgraded.  But this level of presumption is what you would expect from Microsoft or Apple, except they probably don’t have a gconf-editor.  But seriously, how many of you even knew this editor existed before today?

Harmony is restored though.  I can’t say I notice much other change. The OS supposedly starts faster now, but how often do you start your computer from zero when you have a stable operating system that does not reboot itself because you installed a new program or worse, because it installed a new program without asking you first?

Now, getting an entire computer back from the dead is something you really notice.

It was a bit unnerving to disconnect the old wires and cables and trying to remember which went where and finding them on the new power supply.  But amazingly it worked at the first try. And I only got two screws left over. ^_^ I also emptied the machine of a lot of dust…

I am quite joyful to have my best machine back. Not only does it have 4 processor cores instead of Trine’s 3, but each core is also faster. And it has Windows XP instead of the slower Vista.  (I could buy Windows 7 for the Vista machine, but I refuse to pay an extra Microsoft tax to reward them for making a botched operating system in the first place.)  It also happens to have the third and last MS Office license, not that I used it much, and the fourth iTunes. More importantly, it has DRAGON NATURALLYSPEAKING.

You have not forgotten Dragon NaturallySpeaking, have you? The speech recognition program that actually delivers. You may remember Microsoft being ridiculed when they tried to demonstrate the speech recognition in Vista and the computer wrote garbage all over the screen in front of everyone. I hear the speech recognition in Windows 7 is better, but at the moment Nuance has the only reliable speech recognition for personal computers. Yes it costs extra, but it actually works. It is on average as reliable as speaking to a college educated human. I say “on average” because they can both make mistakes, only the mistakes are different when the computer makes them. The computer is very good at listening, but very bad at understanding. It does not make typos unless you manually override it, but it may use words that sound similar and yet make no sense. Or, more commonly, make a different kind of sense.

The previous paragraph was dictated with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and me correcting a few hours. This paragraph is dictated with Dragon NaturallySpeaking but without error correction at all. As you can see, it is possible to dictate several sentences before it goes astray. Of course, I did not actually correct hours as in 60 minutes, but adults as I missed takes. Frequently when you press the “spell that” button, the current text we come up as an alternative. The problem is a spot in the mistakes in the 1st Pl.

Anyway, this is just what the doctor ordered. I mean that literally. When I visited my doctor about not being able to speak more than a few hundred words a day, he recommended that I try saying something every day. Perhaps, he reasoned, I may be able to train my voice back up without surgery, if (as was his theory) my vocal cords have simply fallen into disuse over the years. (I seriously doubt any one in my birth family will agree with his theory, or anyone who went to school with me. Then again, they do not know the Scriptures nor God’s power…)

OK, I better stop dictating.  I have speaking to do tomorrow at work, Light allowing.   And this should be enough technobabble for anyone I can think of that may read my journal. And then some.

Doctor visit and Google

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Being alone is scary for neurotypical humans.  Obviously their vocal cords never fall into disuse with that attitude.  Not so us porcupines.

Yes, doctor visit and Google are connected, even if just a little.  It all started like this:

For years, I have not talked much. Well, hardly at all outside work, and not much at work. After all, I work with computers. I also help people with their computer problems, but for years I mostly did so for the dozens of people in the same house.  Looking back, I did not know how good a time I had!  Not that it is all that bad now.  But back then, there was little reason to say more than a few words when someone had problems. I would go to their office and see for myself.  If they talked to me, they could see that I was listening, so there was no need for me to talk except for essential questions and the occasional reassurance.

The years passed, and my voice fell into disuse. There may be other reasons why my throat now gets sore after five minutes, but it is hard to know.  After all, it is not easy to track the development of a voice problem if you don’t speak!  I was happy with it that way. “Where there are many words, there is no lack of sin” as the Bible says, and indeed the constant talking of people seem to me a hallmark of their superficiality. (I was a massive talker myself when I was a child, and at least a ways into my teens. Possibly longer.)

Lately my work has changed so that user support is now mostly on the phone. This is very nearly the worst kind of talking for me, as I have to speak fairly loudly and clearly.  (Talking in a noisy place is even worse though.) I have been allowed to do mostly non-talking work after I explained the situation to my boss.  But the work at which I am competent is slowly being phased out, and despite numerous requests I have not been formally taught anything new.  For obvious reasons, I cannot just ask my innumerable contacts inside [Himitsu Corp.] since I don’t have any, not speaking to people.

So in the end, after talking (painfully) with an old friend about the matter, I called the rural clinic where my “fixed physician” works (that is a literal translation of the Norwegian word “fastlege”, although the concept itself is hard to believe for the American reader.  Basically you are assigned a doctor from those who have a deal with the State, but you can apply for another if you feel the need to.)  I got an appointment for today at 11AM.

This morning I got a mail from Google, since I had added a mail alert to my appointment.  (I am horrible with appointments, especially doctor and dentist.) This ability to add mail and on-screen alerts is nifty enough, but what impressed me was the extra service:  The name of the rural clinic, which I had added in the location field even though I knew where it was, was now blue and underlined. Yes, it was a link to a local map.  It is not like I needed that, but I was impressed that Google had located the address on its own, without me needing to ask.  Since the name was unique (probably in the world, given that it contains a special Scandinavian letter) it was probably easy for Google to find, but it was still nice of them to do it without being asked.

I, for one, welcome our new robotic underlings.

The doctor visit went well enough.  The doctor jumped to the same conclusion that I had at first, that the symptom was probably caused by inactivity.  It is not something a doctor comes into contact with every year, I bet, since all humans except monks are chatting like their lives depend on it. Which it well may:  Dolphins in isolation die in a matter of hours or a few days at most, while humans take longer but usually go more or less mad after a fairly short time in solitary confinement. It is in fact classified as cruel and unusual, if I remember correctly.  I am no big fan of confinement myself, but given food I would probably be happy to spend a few weeks alone in my house. So I am not exactly normal. (Thank the Light…)

Speaking of which, at some point the doctor suddenly asked if I felt fear when talking on the phone (or “angst”, which in Europe means something more like panic than the trite teenager navelgazing the word refers to in America). I was a bit taken aback by this, although I do live in the nerve pill belt of Norway.  No, I certainly am not afraid of my fellow humans, I assured him.  I don’t like to talk to them, or I would have done so on my free time as well, but I don’t fear them.  (Now, traveling by car, that I fear. You are locked in a small metal box hurtling away at tremendous speed, surrounded by other such boxes also at extreme speed, controlled by humans of on average not very high IQ, not very stable emotions, but grossly inflated self-confidence.  What is not to fear?  That I am even still alive is a miracle of Biblical proportions, is how I see it. Telephones though?  No.  Not until they start trashing about at lethal speed.)

There is no pill for the affliction, as expected.  (I have peeked around online after all.) Again, this makes sense if it really comes from prolonged silence, since this is so rare. The doctor promised to refer me to a specialist, who will send me a letter with the appointment in good time.  It will take at least a few weeks, thought the doctor. Having lived with this for years, I am OK with that.  There may be laryngoscopy though, if worse comes to worse. This may not necessarily prove fatal, but I notice that in lawyer-happy countries you have to sign a form that says it is your own fault if you die from it. We don’t have that here in Norway, as you can’t sue doctors anyway. They are partially employed by the  State and even if they accidentally kill someone, they only get a stern “Uff da!”.  If they just keep killing and killing people, they may eventually be asked to stop practicing, but this is exceedingly rare.  Of course, it is exceedingly rare that people die from this stuff anyway, but I just want to point out that Norway is not America.  Mostly we are thankful for that, of course.

But until further notice, if I don’t keel over from unrelated reasons, I should make sure to talk some every day, and keep water handy for drinking between bouts of talking.  This sound advice set me back a few dollars, the State probably pays another goodly sum for the doctor’s time.  I think the fact that we have to pay anything at all is mostly to discourage people from showing up with random insignificant stuff.  Of course, we do that anyway, we just don’t know it is insignificant until at some point during the visit.

Now, back to Google.

There is something new out, called Google Buzz.  It is a kind of stab at the social media scene, FaceBook and MySpace and the gang.  Twitter too, I guess, but Buzz actually has some integration with Twitter.  Basically it is a microblogging software, meant to write short quick messages.  It shows up next to the inbox in Gmail, and if you have Gmail you becomes a member automatically.  It will add contacts that you have a lot of conversation with, or so it says.  It did not add anyone for me, but this may be because the one person who mails me does not use Gmail…

In addition to posting things on your Buzz homepage (like the “wall” in a certain competitor) it also harvests Twitter, as already mentioned.  Unfortunately it is one way only, probably because Twitter has a much smaller maximum post length. But even short posts are not relayed.  Another source is Google chat status messages. (Like, “Out for lunch”, “Meeting with boss”, “Busy making love” – not necessarily in that sequence and not necessarily right after each other.) Then it harvests pictures from Picasa Web and Flickr, videos from YouTube and blog posts from Blogger / Blogspot.  So much for microblogging.  It is clearly pretty open for Google-owned stuff, while few outsiders get in. No LiveJournal, no WordPress, and noticeably no FaceBook in either direction. Rivalry from first buzz!

So I have had this a couple days now, since it came out.  I turned off the option to show who was following me and who I was following. I don’t have a problem with telling who I read, or would read if they posted anything, but it is not my right to publish choices that other people have made.  They may have reasons to not want to appear online more than strictly necessary, for all I know.  Since you either have to publish both or none, none it is.

So I worked a bit on my Google profile (which is mostly hidden for those of you who are not my contacts) and there it was again.  I had typed in my address, and Google showed it in the map. OK, so it is two houses wrong, but it is really close.  Again, I did nothing to instigate this.  It just integrated Google Maps on its own.

This is boding well, I think.  Computers should not just answer our questions, they should also have the answers to the questions we didn’t know we could ask.

This is not the only invention that makes life easier for computer users. For instance Windows Vista introduced Superfetch, which keeps track of what programs you use and load them while you don’t use the machine.  This would have been an awesome idea if people used computers with lots of memory at the time Vista was released, but most only do that now that Microsoft has switched to the more memory-frugal Windows 7. Still, it was a good idea, in principle, especially if you don’t have users like me who gets deeply suspicious when the computer starts running the hard disk in my absence.  Is it perhaps a virus, is what I think then.  But eventually I drew the conclusion that it was Vista that was the virus.  Still, it works well enough now that I have a 64 bits processor and 4GB RAM.

In the future, if any, I hope to see computer programs that take advantage of extra information they have, to make life easier for the users.  I also hope to be able to talk, but even more I hope not to need to.

Intel Atom, Windows 7, Ubuntu Linux, patience.

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I am not sure when, where and how, but I somehow got the impression that the Intel Atom processor was a kind of cheap, energy-saving and slow processor.  Well, I was wrong about the “slow” part, although I suppose that depends on what you compare it with.  But the HP Mini 2 that I bought (“baby HP” as I think of it because of the tiny size) has an Intel Atom processor, and it is ridiculously fast both in Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux.  I know this because I installed Ubuntu on it today. That was more of an adventure than I had expected.

I did not want to wipe out the fascinating new operating system from Microsoft, but on the other hand I don’t particularly want to have it running when I am online.  I mean, I already paid for it, and that is OK, I was curious after all.  But I have no intention to keep shelling out money for antivirus and related software to keep my computer from getting turned into a spamming zombie, not to mention the identity theft.  So I quickly looked to install Linux on it for use online.  (I tend to install ClamWin, a free antivirus from the highly reliable Sourceforge, on my Windows computers.  But it is the kind of tool that you use to actively scan your machine, or individual files, for viruses. It does not patrol the computer’s memory while you are online to stop any worms trying to crawl in.  (As a result, it does not slow down the machine either, but still, I prefer not having to worry about “badware” at all.)

Usually installing Ubuntu is a snap. I have a CD lying around with a fairly recent version of the OS, and it will then bring itself up to date over the Internet once it is up and running.  However, the HP Mini 2 does not have a CD drive.  I suppose I could take it home and try with an external CD & DVD reader I have here, but even then it is uncertain whether it would work since you cannot boot from a device that is initialized long after boot time.

If I had thought of this beforehand, I could have prepared a bootable USB memory stick to do the same thing.  There is in fact a menu choice in Ubuntu for making such a tool (you still have to buy the memory key of course).   But I wasn’t at home and not patient enough to wait till next day. So I used Wubi Installer, a program that downloads Ubuntu (or any of its siblings in the *buntu family) and installs it under Windows.  The program uses Windows’ file system to reserve a chunk of the hard disk, then sets up Ubuntu within that.  Despite Wubi itself being run from Windows, and the whole Ubuntu package being deletable from Windows, it does use its own file system internally and when you reboot the machine you will get the choice between the two operating systems. So it is only during the install that you actually need Windows.

Wubi went through the routine easily enough, and asked me to reboot. I did.  A black screen came up when the machine started, with an underscore in the upper left corner.  This is widely considered a bad thing.  I waited for a while, but there was no sign of activity, so I forced the machine to shut down with the on/off switch.  It booted again, with the same paltry underscore and nothing underneath.

This is where my tiny shred of patience saved the day.  Instead of getting overly excited in a bad way (and risking physical damage to the computer, as might have happened if I had been much, much younger) I decided to unplug the mobile phone that was charging over the USB bus.  Started again with no USB connections whatsoever – and the computer continued the install of Ubuntu as if nothing had happened.

I must admit I had first thought the problem came from installing the wrong version of Ubuntu. I had left that to the installer to decide, and it installed the AMD 64-bits version. Surely, I thought, Intel is not AMD and Atom is not 64-bits.  I still think I was right on the first count, although the machine did not seem to care.  I was wrong on the second though.  This particular version of the Atom is in fact 64-bits, despite its small footprint, low price and low power consumption. What is the world coming to?

After complete installation, the computer rebooted again.  Unfortunately, it did not boot up in graphical mode (with X windows), but in pure text mode, asking for user name and password in white letters on a black screen. And then rejecting it.  I had in the meantime connected the Western Digital Passport USB-powered external hard disk.  Rebooting without it worked.

As usual, Linux is even faster than Windows, even with a new install.  Both of them are really, really fast though. Compared to my old HP laptops this one is ridiculously much faster, even though it only has 1 GB of RAM, twice as much as the last of the old ones.  This processor is really something.  Small, cool, low-power, and fast. In the good old days you could not have it all, but now you can.  And it will still be some time, it seems, till I need Ubuntu for the speed. Even Windows 7 is delightfully fast for non-gaming use.

So patience paid off eventually, what little I had of it.  But I think I will recommend starting with more patience and an USB stick.

And now, I severely need sleep. I am tired and cold and queasy and achy and came home at 10PM after cleaning in the old house.  But I got Ubuntu loaded on yet another machine and got a journal entry written, “so all in all it was a good day”.

Windows has some catching up to do

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This old laptop is actually running a lot more programs at the same time than it looks like. It has four workspaces (virtual screens), three of which are active with a number of programs each. Then again, it is running Ubuntu Linux, not Microsoft Windows. Oh, and there’s an USB memory key and a 2 TB external harddisk tucked away behind it…

I am impressed by Windows 7, but already Ubuntu Linux is ahead in some ways, and it can be hard for Microsoft to catch up. On the other hand, there are ways in which Windows is better. If I were to say it in few words, Ubuntu is better for grandmothers and teenagers, Windows for those inbetween.

Ubuntu Linux is the most popular of several user-friendly variants of the free operating system. It is free not only as in free speech but also in the sense that you don’t pay for it. Just download it off the net or copy it from a friend or get it in the mail. (Not sure if you have to pay postage.) And it really is Grandma-friendly, if a computer can ever be that.

The program installs itself after some pretty simple questions, like what language you prefer and what timezone you will use it in. If there already is Windows or MacOS on the computer, you can choose whether to keep these, and whether you want to decide how much space to give each of them or if you will let the installer decide.

The computer has a couple start menus in the upper left corner (although you can drag the task bar elsewhere – I have mine at the bottom like I did in Windows). There are a number of useful programs installed already, like web browser and media player and text processor and spreadsheet. (Seriously, who uses spreadsheets unless their boss tells them to?) There are even small games. But the really nuclear feature that blows Windows out of the ring is the Add Programs feature. You want some more? Just open the Ubuntu Software Center, pick categories (or search if you have an idea of what you want, like “chess” or “Bible” or whatever grandmothers do these days). Once you find something interesting, you can read a blurb about it, and if you want it, just click. The software installs itself and will show up in the start menu in the correct category.

It does not stop there. Add hardware? By all means.  Plug in a printer, a camera, an MP3 player – pretty much anything that uses USB or Firewire and some things that don’t. It is very rare that you have to use the CD that comes in the box, the one marked “Windows”. Especially if you are online, but often if you are not, Ubuntu will just tell you what you have installed and that’s that. No whining that Oh Noes This Was Not Certified For Our Newest Brand Of Windows. Rather it just works. There are a few things that truly do need Windows to work, because they were made that way, but these are generally way outside the Grandma range. And for each passing month people are adding new stuff to the system.

That’s another part. Even more than Windows, Linux has a heap of downloads. It is rarely a day that there is not a small colored arrow in the task bar, hinting that new updates are ready. In case Grandma does not take the hint, a text box may appear the first time. You have to give your passwords to install those though, so if we’re talking about a great-grandmother she may be a bit nervous about doing that. You should visit occasionally. That said, unlike Windows you will not be forced to restart the system. (You should do this twice a year or so, when there is a major update to a new and better version. But there is no need to do it for daily updates.)

Another thing, if you don’t download the updates, you won’t get virus and worms and Trojans and keyloggers and spybots and adbots. If one particular brand of Linux becomes extremely popular, perhaps someone will write this kind of malware for it, but currently there is none, and the system is built up in such a way that the user does not have root access anyway, so it is limited what a virus can do. Theory aside, the fact as of today is that you just don’t get virus and stuff like that if you use Linux. Even if you don’t update. And on top of that, Canonical (the people who made Ubuntu) don’t take remote control of your computer and restart it in the middle of the night like Microsoft sometimes does if you leave it on.  To be a bit harsh, I say that it is sometimes hard to see the difference between virus and Windows, since they both suddenly start doing strange things on your computer without you touching it. Not so with Ubuntu Linux. It does its job and gets out of the way.

Unlike Windows, Ubuntu does not get slower as the months pass. Well, it may get slower over the years as you upgrade to new versions with even more features. But if you just run the same version, it won’t get slower as the hard disk fills up. This is because it uses another file system. (You can choose to format disks with FAT or NTFS, but Grandma sure won’t do that.) There is no need to defragment the hard disk, and you also don’t need to clean the Registry because it does not work that way. Even if Ubuntu had not been faster from the start (which it is), it would have been much faster after a year or two when Windows starts to slow down noticeably.

***

Now for the teenagers. Well, it is not literally restricted to teenagers. Anyone who has a lot of time on their hands and no pressing obligation, which means both teenagers and single college students… Anyway, if you have the time to go “under the hood” and tune up the operating system of your computer, Linux is the way to go. You can basically make your own operating system, bit by bit. Of course, this means typing a lot, most of it lines starting with “sudo”. But there you have it. Real computer geeks would not be satisfied with clicking a mouse anyway.

Let’s say, for instance, that you have an old laptop with a slow hard disk and only 256 MB memory, but it just happens to have a free USB 2.0 port. (I guess it must have been fairly early with USB 2, or perhaps it just was late with the low memory. Anyway, you are in luck.) So you rummage in your computer gizmo grab bag, or even go out and buy a fast USB memory key. The faster the better: Speed is more important than capacity here.

Once you have found a small memory stick, you plug it in and open it from the desktop to see what name it is given in the /media/ folder. You open a terminal window and go to that folder. Then you create a file there, making sure it is not larger than the actual capacity of the USB drive. For instance, sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile1 bs=1024 count=4194304 will create a 4 GB file (1024 * 4096) with blocks of 1KB initialized as zero. Obviously if your drive is only 4GB, you will want to pick a lower number so you don’t get an error message instead of a swap file. Make sure you really are in the folder of the USB drive or you will create it on the slower hard disk – if there is room there.

Once the computer has chewed its way through creating this file, you make it into a swapfile with the command sudo mkswap swapfile1 (you should get some message to confirm that this has happened.) Then finally you can start using it with the command sudo swapon -p 3 swapfile1 where -p is the code for “priority” and you can use basically any positive number afterwards. If you have more than one swapfile, the one with the highest -p will go first, then when it is full the next will get a go. You may want to run swapon -s afterwards to see statistics of use, but if you have lights on your USB key they should start blinking pretty soon when you start working again.

You may want to save the command sudo swapon -p 3 swapfile1 to a file with the .sh file extension, which you can run if you have to reboot the computer for some reason. Perhaps you already have a file with commonly used commands that you run on such occasions. If not, let us assume you just name the file “swapit.sh”, in which case you just run sh swapit.sh next morning or whenever. Of course, if you include the command in a file that lies in another folder, you must have given the path to the filename in the shell file, like this: sudo swapon -p 3 /media/MyUSBkeyName/swapfile1 (where the name will vary depending on a lot of things). Let’s just hope it stays constant from one day to the next. Then again, unless you are used to Windows, you probably don’t reboot your computer every day. It is probably busy downloading unspeakably secret stuff all night, if you are the aforementioned high school or college student.

Of course you could make the whole USB drive into a swap partition and edit the /etc/fstab file to set it up as swap at startup time. But this was just a demo, which incidentally works, and gives you 4GB (or whatever) of slow memory in addition to the 256 MB of fast memory. (Flash memory is rather slow to write to, but it excels at small random reads, which is what happens when you actually use the swapped memory, since you never know which part you are going to use. Especially not if you are a teenager.)

This in contrast to Windows XP, where you do it graphically:  Open Control Panel, System, and set the virtual memory page file to the desired size and location, reboot (because nothing happens without reboot, you know) and then watch as nothing happens, because the page swap file is created before the USB key is initialized… Shame, but at least you don’t need to use four-letter words like sudo on your road to failure.

Windows Vista is even simpler: It won’t start on 256 MB. But on a larger system, it can use fast USB memory to cache various files, speeding up the system response on computers with slow hard disks and low memory (low by Vista standards, like 1 GB and such). Actually, this “readyboost” feature was what made me think of it. But a teenager does not need to think: Doing crazy things is its own reward.

***

I expect Windows to keep its dominance in the workplace though. There is a lot of “legacy” software out there, which nobody wants to write from scratch again. In fact, in many cases the people who wrote it are dead or retired (or fired after a merger long ago) so you would have to think the whole thing anew. Until Linux runs all kinds of Windows software better than Windows (instead of just some of it), there won’t be much change there.

Windows also has a strong position in gaming. While some games written for Windows also run under Linux (such as City of Heroes) and even may run faster, other titles don’t run at all (such as The Sims 2 and The Sims 3.) In many cases the reason is as prosaic as copy protection that uses the Windows Registry or even undocumented Windows features.

With a free operating system now being neck to neck with the rather expensive Windows and MacOS, it may only be a question of time before free games also reach the same level as their commercial counterparts. But they aren’t there yet, so if I live, I am likely to own a machine with Windows 8 someday. After that, it’s anybody’s guess. Pretty soon, Ubuntu Linux may not just be a better operating system than Windows, but also a better Windows than Windows. Wait and see.

Teeth and laptops, again

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Long-time readers may remember that I seem to have discovered a cause and effect that is hard for science to explain.   Using the formula of a well known Internet meme, I have summed it up like this:  “Each time you buy a laptop, God kills a tooth.”  This has held true at least three times in a row:  I bought a laptop computer, and one of my teeth broke or came loose.  (Although two of the times it was an artificial tooth, of which I have two or three, I think.)

Well, we are about to find out whether it is a rule without exception, because I not only bought a new laptop today, I also went to the dentist.  Actually, I went to the dentist first.  This was a routine checkup that I have twice a year.  The dentist did not find any holes this time (yay!), although the still took some money for the time and the x-rays.   When I returned to my workplace, however, my laptop was broken.  Well, not literally broken to pieces, but it was not a laptop anymore.  The screen now showed 6 small pictures instead of one large.  It was not merely a driver issue either:  I got this picture already in GRUB (the loader where you choose which operating system to run) and even when booting straight from a CD.  So at the very least something was wrong in the BIOS (basic input/output system) or mechanically somewhere on the path from the computer to the screen.  I don’t know, I don’t do that machine-near work anymore and haven’t for many years.  The problem is solved by plugging it into an external monitor, but alas, that was not what I used it for.

So we have the opposite situation of the normal.  The laptop breaks, but the tooth is good as new! Obviously something was telling me, “Good job with those teeth! Go buy yourself a new laptop.”  God does not admit to having said that, but said, approximately “You’ll probably try to do it anyway.”  Which I did, of course.  So now we just have to see what happens to my teeth.

Besides getting a new actually portable computer, I was particularly interesting in trying out Windows 7 while it lasts.  I hear they have started work on Windows 8 already.  Of course, I am used to Ubuntu Linux, which comes with a new version twice a year, but those are free.  A new Windows version is quite an event, despite the relatively short shelf life of Windows Vista.  Windows 7 is supposed to be much better.  Well, what do you know, it is.  After the lengthy process of setting up the computer, it was quite responsive despite its low-energy processor and only 1 GB of RAM.  (Of course, five years ago 1GB was a lot of RAM and had to be ordered separately.)

A small disappointment was that it rejected my 4GB USB memory stick for use with ReadyBoost. It was not good enough, I was told.  (It was good enough for Vista, in its time.)  I guess with the new, faster and sleeker operating system you need faster accessories to add anything useful.

The lack of an internal CD drive means I cannot just install Ubuntu from the CD I used on the other machine, I will have to prepare a USB key instead.  But for the first days, I hope to use Windows 7 and see how good it really is.  I am sure I could find something to mock it for eventually. But it sure beats Vista, very much so.

The computer incidentally came with a 250 GB hard disk, despite its rather low specs otherwise. This surprised me, but will surely come in handy if I am to have two operating systems on it. In any case, I expect this to be my last laptop with rotating hard disk instead of SSD (solid state disk, flash disk).  SSD is more expensive by far, but the difference is shrinking,  it is faster on reading small files and it uses less power.  It seems like an obvious part of the next generation of laptop. Although I probably won’t be seeing any of those for a while, because this time I bought a Hewlett Packard.  I love HP and HP loves me, it seems:  My HP computers just keep going on and on, year after year, until they are just too slow even with Linux. That can take a while. If this one lasts as long as the one on the table beside me at home, there will certainly be many changes before I need another.  It came with Windows XP, and now we have Windows 7.  I wonder how long Microsoft can keep up with the competition – Linux in particular is improving at a ferocious speed – but Windows 7 is definitely a decent buy.  If you can do it without breaking any teeth, at least…