Google Reader

It seems like I am always late to the party. That is, whenever there is some new trend in the computer world, I never manage to be an early adopter even when I would like to be. No doubt the wisest course is as Alexander Pope described:

Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Nonetheless, I usually find myself on the 2nd line of this quote rather than the first. Perhaps you'd think that being at home full-time recovering from a major illness would give me more opportunity to try things sooner. Unfortunately, about all I seem to run across early are funny videos on YouTube.

Anyway, philosophizing aside, I did want to describe a relatively new Google service that you may not have had a chance to look at. You have probably heard about RSS feeds and aggregators. The whole subject is quite complex, with the usual convoluted history and politics that rapidly evolving technology always has. Over the last few years, there have been a number of different approaches to handling feed aggregation. Attempts at comparing these different approaches are, frankly, unusably complicated. Because of all of that, I just hadn't been able to make much progress in figuring out what, if anything, I wanted to do with the whole area.

Some months ago, Google (as part of its overall plan for benign world domination) introduced their version of an aggregator, dubbed Google Reader:

http://www.google.com/reader

It was easy to set up, easy to use, and certainly meets my modest needs for reading blogs and other feeds. Implemented as a web application, it is available from any computer without needing to download anything. You login using the same ID you use for Gmail and the other Google services. Once you login you see a straightforward multi-pane browser. The left pane lists the feeds you have subscribed to, and which of those has new entries. Upon choosing a particular feed, the right pane shows postings from that feed in reverse chronological order, with the newest ones naturally at the top. Depending on how the feed is set up, what comes through in the right pane is either the full text of each posting (although not necessarily formatted quite the same way as the original) or a short version. Either way, you can click on the posting's title to get a new window with the full posting as seen in the original blog or feed.

Google has made it particularly easy to add more feeds with an 'Add Subscription' link. Clicking that brings up a small dialog box in which you can enter either a URL for a new feed, if you happen to know it already, or a search string, in which case the reader brings up in the right pane a list of matching possibilities which you can then subscribe to with a single click.

The Reader has other features which you can easily find for yourself, such as how to arrange your feeds into folders (which are really more like Gmail labels). So far, Google's Reader is complete ad-free.

I suppose I should wrap this up by recommending a few blogs. Let me hasten to say that it has been my experience that whenever someone tells me "you'll just love" book X, movie Y or website Z, there is at least a 60% chance that my reaction will not be one of love. (Why this is true remains one of the great mysteries of my life. The persona I project and the person I am on the inside must be truly out of sync.) So, I will simply say that I have found these blogs interesting and thought-provoking. They tell you very little about my own views of things.

• http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog: The Bad Astronomer. 'bad' here does not mean 'poor in quality', but it could mean several other things. Covers a wide variety of science related topics.
  
• http://www.pandasthumb.org/: The Panda's Thumb. Written by Francis Collins, an evolutionary biologist who wrote The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. Although himself a devout Christian, he spends a lot of time working against the Intelligent Design crowd.
• http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/: The Dilbert Blog. Remarkably insightful yet usually very funny observations and commentary by Scott Adams.
• http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/: The Long Tail. Commentary by Chris Anderson, the senior editor of Wired. His book with the same title explores in depth the impact that the widespread adoption of computer technology has made in the sheer number of choices consumers now have available.
  

There are tens of thousands of other choices available, of course, and I encourage you to go forth and read!

Addendum: Ron Jeffries recently wrote about his experience switching from Bloglines to Google Reader, which very much mirrored my own. His posting was prompted by an earlier posting by Gina Trapani on the same topic.

Back In The Saddle Again

I was astonished to see how long it has been since I had last posted here. Of course, part of the gap was caused by the great hubbub around my house since Nov. 17, when the first of our far-flung children began arriving for our Thanksgiving holiday. (See photo below.) Since then, I had managed a few reply postings on several of the existing threads, particularly the most recent one about wireless power. Nonetheless, I had intended to be much more faithful about writing. I will endeavor to make up for that now!

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From left to right: Shelby (Sam's wife), Sam, Dave, me, Mary, Audra (Mike's wife), Mike, Tim, Becky, and Steve. Missing are Tom and Becky's husband Nate. At the lower left you can see the shadow of our friend Armando, who fortuituously arrived just in time to take our picture.

Standing Here Beside Myself

Perhaps you've wondered about the title of this blog. The phrase comes from a light-weight science fiction comedy called Short Circuit, which is about a death-dealing military robot, Number 5, who comes 'alive' when accidentally zapped by high voltage. A lot of the humor in the movie comes from the dialog between the robot's inventor and his Indian computer scientist side-kick, Ben Jabituya, played by American actor Fisher Stevens. The Jabituya character speaks that wonderful kind of twisted English one often hears in highly trained technical people from India, and his speech is full of malaprops, malaphors and other forms of unexpected and difficult English. The other characters also have plenty of funny things to say. Anyway, my favorite of all these is when Jabituya, in a moment of confusion and uncertainty, says to no-one in particular

I am standing here beside myself.

Certainly I've felt that way a lot.

More On Wireless Power

As you recall, a couple of weeks ago I whined about the lack of any practical wireless power transmission technology suitable for reducing the clutter of wires that desktop computers require. Several days ago, my friend (and wireless power skeptic) Erik passed on to me the news that MIT professor Marin Soljacic had announced that his research team had come up with a simple scheme to transmit useful amounts of power for short distances. Using "non-radiative" resonance between two precisely tuned coils, the system injects a high frequency current into one coil, and extracts induced power from the other. Here is a diagram from the BBC article about this:

1) Power from mains to antenna, which is made of copper

2) Antenna resonates at a frequency of 6.4MHz, emitting electromagnetic waves

3) 'Tails' of energy from antenna 'tunnel' up to 5m (16.4ft)

4) Electricity picked up by laptop's antenna, which must also be resonating at 6.4MHz. Energy used to re-charge device

5) Energy not transferred to laptop re-absorbed by source antenna. People/other objects not affected as not resonating at 6.4MHz

I have tried to find more details about what Soljacic means by 'tails' of energy 'tunneling' between the coils, but have so far found nothing. The text of the paper he was going to present is not online yet. Soljacic claims that the system can work with up to 50% efficiency, which is good enough for small applications such as delivering power to peripherals on and around the desktop. The system he describes is designed to provide power within a 5 meter radius, but he also claims that similar systems could work both at nanoscale and at the scale of a factory floor.

Of course, all of this remains to be proven, since as far as I can tell no-one has actually built a system yet. It's all just theoretical results. Also, it is not clear whether there will be any significant side-effects, either for living things or for other electronics. I eagerly look forward to further developments. Interestingly, what inspired this bit of research was Soljacic's repeated irritation with forgetting to plug his cellphone into its recharger.

Addendum:
I finally located a preprint of Soljacic's paper on arxiv.

Blue Mania

Mary and I had a wonderful visit to Chicago this past weekend to visit our oldest son Sam and his wife Shelby. They just moved there in May, and we had not had a chance to see their new home. We took the train down, which is much better than driving, but still not stress-free. Sam and Shelby took us around to a few favorite places of theirs, but the highlight of the weekend was an unexpected treat Sam came up with. On Saturday afternoon we went to see a matinee performance of the Blue Man Group. It's hard to describe them, since mere words fail. Inspired lunacy? Exalted silliness? A mystical clown act? There's these three guys, see, and their heads are painted blue, and they are fantastic drummers, and they never say a word, although the narrator does sometimes, and they are very ... messy, and ... well, you should definitely go see them if you have the chance.

The audience obviously had a lot of Blue Man fans who were familiar with their performances. It reminded me a little of the zaniness that regularly went on when people watched The Rocky Horror Picture. The raucous behavior of a bunch of Girl Scouts I can understand. But the weirdnesses exhibited by middle-aged women were a bit odd to behold. Anyway, after the performance, the three Blue Men were in the lobby of the theatre so you could take pictures with them. They stayed totally in character and never said a word. We took our time leaving, so by the time we got to the lobby there wasn't a waiting line to get a picture. That's when we got this:



You can't make it out very well, but the Blue Man is holding my cane. I handed it to him to see what he would do. He said nothing, but turned around several times just looking at it. Then when we took the picture, he held it up as you can see.

I even got a little Blue Man blue on my shirt from my close encounter. Mary didn't seem to mind. She said that she wasn't going to wash the shirt.

Contra Ancoralia Redux

As a follow-on to my Contra Ancoralia posting from Nov. 1, Eric pointed me at this new product that does indeed deliver power wirelessly. Eric also pointed out the circumspect warning at the bottom of the product writeup:

Warning: Even though these microwaves are about as harmful as the leakage from an ordinary microwave oven (not much), do not put computers, televisions, other sensitive electrical equipment, food, liquids, paper, glass, flammable substances, magnets, or living things in between the base and satellite units. Just in case.

which would certainly give one pause. However, at only $35 for a base-satellite pair, I may just have to try this out. Since this design uses beamed power (beamcasting?), it would appear that it is not as wasteful as power broadcasting would be. Unfortunately, as implemented, this scheme does not directly address the problem of reducing the wire clutter behind a computer.

Audiospam

I know without asking that anybody who would be reading this blog (or maybe any blog) is sick to death of automated junk political phone calls. Here in Michigan these calls all have a certain frantic tone to them that is pathetic. I've heard from both Democrats and Republicans, and even one Socialist. I say 'heard from' although I never listen to the whole thing. I can usually tell that it's a junk call before I answer it, because it has an 800 or 888 area code. If I can get to the phone on time, I can answer and then hang up without having to hear a word. Otherwise, it goes on to our answering machine, and the offending ad echoes through the house from the loudspeaker. It's all intrusive and offensive.

It occurred to me that these messages must be like spam email. Everyone hates them, supposedly. No-one ever listens to any of them if they can help it. So where is the benefit to the parties and candidates? There must be at least some unfortunate souls who are so bereft of sense and decency that they actually listen to these ads and are influenced by them. I figure that these are the same folks that spammers are trying to reach, that tiny fraction of 1% of email recipients who will buy the advertised questionable products and thus justify the cost of sending the spam to huge numbers of other uninterested recipients.

We haven't been able to legislate spam email away. But we were able to get the National Do Not Call Registry to prevent commercial solicitors from calling us. Unfortunately, political parties and other non-profit organizations were able to lobby their way past this, so they are not bound by the NDNCR. Hmmm. Do you think that might be because the congresspersons who wrote the legislation might have an interest in being able to use phone soliciting for their own purposes? No, couldn't be.

Do you know the worst part about automated phone advertising? You can yell, and scream, and curse all you want, and nobody hears you. And there is no-one to whom you can demand "Take me off of your phone list. I never want to get another call from you."

Relocating, The Hard Way

As sort of an interesting postscript to my earlier comments about wires and cables, today my family watched a well-organized team of workmen, engineers, drivers, technicians, police, etc., orchestrate moving a house through Ann Arbor. I've occasionally seen house-moving projects before, but this was by far the biggest and most impressive. The house in question is a two-story, 160-year-old brick structure. I hesitate to guess at its weight. The platform it rested on was massive. The two front-loaders that towed it were massive. Even the cop out front waving people away was massive. One of the onlookers I was with commented that she had read reports that the whole operation, from original acquisition to final setup, was going to cost around $1M. The owner must really have a thing for this house. Oh, and its original location is going to be replaced with some sort of multi-function residential/commercial thing.

Anyway, I thought of the wires and cables discussion as I watched the incredibly arduous work that the various crews had to perform to carefully take down power lines, telephone lines, cable lines, street lights, traffic lights, etc., so that the house could pass. You couldn't have avoided taking down the lights, but all the rest of it would have been so much easier if the various cables had been run underground, or better yet, not even there (i.e., replaced with wireless equivalents)!

I know, I know. It's too much to ask for. After all, do you really think you could run an arc welder on wireless power? Some things probably will always require wires. At least until, we get our own Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactors that can run off of kitchen waste.

Storing Your Data On Somebody Else's Machine

This posting is more of a question than a comment. Over the last several years, there has been a surge in various web-based services that encourage you to store your data and documents on machines that you don't control. The winner in this category is, of course, Google, who provides the world with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Documents & Spreadsheets, Google Base, Google Notebook, Picasa and most recently JotSpot. There are other companies that provide similar services, such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Flickr, etc. These services are very attractive because of factors such as

• large (or even unlimited) disk storage
• universal accessibility (i.e., you can get to your data from any machine you would like)
• reliable data backup and other maintenance
  
• highly functional and constantly improving software

All of these services seem to make their money by showing you advertising along with your data. That's OK, I guess. They all seem to provide decent password-based security so that only you and those you specify can access your data and documents. The main drawback to such services is simply that you are depending on somebody else to take good care of your data even though they have no direct financial or legal incentive to do so. Also, in nearly every case, there is no easy way to get your data out of these systems. You are pretty much locked in unless you do some clever hacking.

This last point would seem to be an especially serious obstacle, only it's not, at least for me and millions of others. I've thought about it a lot of times, but I keep making the choice to store my email, my files, my data, etc. on these services because of the factors listed above.

What do you think about this situation? What do you do?

Contra Ancoralia

Around the turn of the Millennium, it was common to hear complaints about why the future wasn't here already. As one friend put it, "I desire rockets. Why aren't there rockets?" Those of us who grew up on 50s and 60s TV shows had a clear idea of what the future was supposed to look like. For the most part, we aren't anywhere close to that stream-lined high-design vision. True, there have been some astounding and largely unanticipated developments, but almost none of them moved us to a Buck Rogers future.

Instead, we are surrounded by technology that may work, but which is clunky, ugly, boring, and unpleasant to use. That pretty well describes most of the devices we have to work with in our daily lives. The most extreme example of this problem we typically encounter is a desktop computer. Such a machine usually has the following:

• a box containing the processor, memory, disk drives, and various interface cards
• a monitor
• a keyboard
• a mouse
• a set of speakers
• a printer
• lots and lots of cables, including power cables for the processor, monitor, speakers and printer; data/signal cables connecting the monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers and printer to the processor box; a network cable connecting the processor to some sort network port
  

The result is a setup that is hard to move or change, and which has an incredibly ugly and awkward rat's nest of cables strung behind and under it. It is no wonder we prefer so-called "tower" configurations, since those usually let you leave most of the cabling on the floor and out of sight.

One solution to the rat's nest problem is to put as much as possible into one box. Apple went that way with some of its designs and really worked at minimizing the number of cables. This is one of the reasons that Apple computers are considered to be more attractive than the typical PC. However even the admittedly classier Apple machines still have some cables. Laptop and palm computers represent other attempts to put everything into one package. However, they too reveal substantial shortcomings of one kind or another due to their small size and limited battery life.

Cables and wires make computers ugly, but they make other things ugly and awkward as well. For instance, go to a gym and watch someone trying not to drop a CD player as they struggle with the headphones while they are madly pedalling away on an elliptical trainer. (That problem has been slightly alleviated by the smaller and lighter Ipod, but even it has a wire to get tangled up in.) Also, you have doubtless seen someone fighting with a microphone cable on a stage, or perhaps have yourself cursed at the electric cord of your vacuum as it once again flops into your path while you are sweeping. Interestingly, the creators of the Star Trek: The Next Generation science fiction television series depicted the Borg (who are the primary villains in the series) as having cables and tubes connecting various parts of their own bodies. Cables, wires, and tubes represent the very soul of technological ugliness.

By contrast, one of the reasons that wireless household phones and cellphones are so wildly popular is simply because they have no wires. Likewise, coffee shops and bookstores have attracted a whole new clientele by providing cheap or free wireless Internet connnections. One of the oldest wireless technologies is the lowly pager, which is now essential in many professions such as medicine.

To me, the greatest contributor to the whole problem is the very notion of the cable. Somehow we have fixated on the idea that to get power or signal from one point to another we have to have a wire between the two points. What would a proper replacement to wires and cables look like? We have various wireless technologies to use for the signal portion of this problem, and a few of those (such as Bluetooth and 802.11*) are starting to make real in-roads in some applications. Still, it is not at all common to use those technologies within a computer. We still have printer cables, video cables, speaker cables, etc., to connect the various components. There is a considerable ways to go on that front.

Even if we are making progress on handling the wireless transmission of signals, we continue to neglect the other part of the problem, namely power transmission. At this point we really only ever see two solutions for powering our devices: batteries and power cables. This continues to baffle me. Nikola Tesla had working wireless power systems in use in his laboratories in the 1890s to power appliances on his workbenches. Have we really made no progress at all in this area in the intervening 110+ years? It would seem to me that one could do a great deal with inductive coupling. Tesla's system used this idea, with a coil running around the perimeter of a room's ceiling, and every appliance having an antenna coil to pick up the radiated power.

If you are uncomfortable living inside such a coil there are other possibiities. Imagine, for example, this power system:

• The basis of the system is a floor consisting of interconnecting squares.
• Each square has AC power connections to its four edges, so that power can flow freely among all the squares in the floor.
• Each square has a large, flat induction coil built into it, with the axis of the coil perpendicular to the square.
• Each square has a small bit of circuitry to control whether power is applied to the inductive coil. This circuit would be similar to the loop sensor embedded in streets to detect the passage of vehicles.
• Any appliance needing power, such as a floor lamp, has a foot or pad that contains another coil similar to the ones in the floor squares.
• When you place such an appliance on a floor square, the square's detection circuit senses that there is an inductive load above the square, and applies full power to the coil. This in turn induces an AC current in the coil in the foot, which then powers the device.
• You may move the device anywhere in the room, being limited only to placing it so as to adequately intersect a floor square.

Once you see this basic idea, other implementations suggest themselves. For example, it would seem pretty straightforward to use the new flexible circuit technologies to create similar power transmission flooring materials that you can unroll and lay like linoleum. You can also extend this idea to the table level, by having a table or desk whose surface is constructed in a similar way with a set of power squares. To power your keyboard or monitor, you simply set it on a powered surface wherever you like. You can also extended it to handheld devices such as electric mixers, flashlights, cordless drills, cellphones, etc. Such gadgets would have to have small batteries to power them while they are in use, but once you set them back down on the table, they would start to recharge themselves automatically without having to be plugged into any special socket.

I'm not sure that the above scheme is the best one, but I'm certain that some scheme like this could work. More importantly, just using this idea in a thought experiment helps free one from the literal shackle of the power cable. I might point out that the Latin word for cable in the title of this posting (ancoralia) comes from the same root as the word for anchor. A cable is an anchor and keeps you fastened to one spot. If you want to live like Buck Rogers, you must be free to move, and cannot afford any kind of anchor.

Updated 1/20/2007:
Other posts related to this topic:

• Relocating The Hard Way
• Contra Ancoralia Redux
• More On Wireless Power
• 'Contra Ancoralia Redux' Redux
• Low Power Blues
• Thawing Out
• More On Thawing Out