Web Tools: Panoramio & Flickr

I was going to write a review of Flickr because I used it recently to post a few snapshots from my cell phone and I thought it was rather cool that I could do that. Just before I got into writing about it, I remembered that I'd also posted some images on Google's Panoramio site and I thought it would be interesting to compare the two.

Flickr lives at http://www.flickr.com/ and my tiny piece of it can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/28718989@N06/ It was easy to set up and is also easy to use. You can upload an image file or you can email a picture to it. They have very specific instructions on how to send a photo from your cell phone and I think this is probably the most attractive feature. Of course the resolution and clarity of images from my ancient cell phone are not what I get from my Pentax but for some applications it's fine. It's certainly easier to post a quick picture here than it is to get one on my web site which leads to the question of how web site publishing is going to develop. I suspect that the sort of facility that Flickr provides will become available on all the web site hosting services. It probably isn’t that hard to do and I think this might be popular with people who just want some place to upload images that they can tell friends and family about.

My experience with Panoramio is quite different. I found out about it when I was using Google Earth one day. The main site is here: http://www.panoramio.com/. My photos are here: http://www.panoramio.com/user/1120690. The big feature of Panoramio is not that you can publish your images on the web but that they show up in Google Earth. Mine are from two trips. One trip was up part of Barr Trail on Pikes Peak and the other was a trip around Rocky Mountain National Park. I used my Garmin GPS to record the coordinates for each photo and then used the Panoramio site to upload the images and place them correctly on the map. this takes some practice and you need to understand Latitude and Longitude coordinate formats. Some camera already record GPS information and I can see Panoramio adapting perhaps to the methods Flickr uses for uploading.

One feature of Panoramio that is interesting is that all images are reviewed before being made public. This takes several weeks. There are a lot of rules about what can and can not be posted but mostly the rules keep the images devoid of offensive stuff and anything that is personal. I like Panoramio mostly because I enjoy just surfing around on Google Earth and for some places it allows you to effectively zoom way in and see things very clearly - if only from one person's point of view.

Moon Base – Failed Prediction - Part 1

The Apollo program that was started by President Kennedy in 1962 with his famous speech at Rice University (http://www.hbci.com/~tgort/jfk_rice.htm). captured the hearts and minds of much of America. It provided an exciting prospect and allowed the US to show the Russians how good our technology was. Despite a shaky start with the Atlas and Redstone rocket projects [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redstone_(rocket), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_rocket], and Russia getting Gagarin into space first on April 12, 1961, the US soon caught up and past the Russian achievements.

The Apollo program injected over 20 billion of dollars (1960’s dollars – equivalent to about 50 billion dollars today) into the US economy partly through the many contractors involved in manufacturing parts and sub-systems for the Saturn rocket and other parts; partly through money spent in the US colleges solving difficult problems like the flame instability in the rocket engine bells (See: http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/saturnv.htm).

By 1975 we were planning on putting some kind of structure on the moon. Boeing even built part of it in Seattle. Predictions had us putting some kind of colony on the Moon by around 1975 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Applications_Program).

But after Apollo 17 it all stopped. The funding was cut and the program cancelled. The last of the giant Saturn V boosters ended up as tourist attractions and we still have not gone back. Only twelve men have walked on the surface of the moon and the last of them left the final human footprints there December 1972.

In October 2003 (http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/shenzhou5_china_archive.html) the Chinese launched their first manned vehicle and on Jan 14, 2004 President George W. Bush announced that the US would be going back to the Moon and on to Mars (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040114-1.html). He boldly stated that we would conduct the first of the new manned missions to the Moon by 2014 - which is only 5 1/2 years away. It took seven years just to build the LEM last time.

Apollo was a publicity stunt in many ways. Kennedy wanted to show the Russians that Americas had the technology, financial resources and skills to do something impossible. And we did it with remarkably little loss of life. Compared to aircraft development, the entire space program is about as safe as growing roses. It’s certainly safer than driving to work every day. But Apollo was a very expensive program and despite the fact that it provided the US with many new inventions and discoveries such as Tang (which my teenage son rediscovered recently) and all sorts of material science, its public interest waned and many thought the money could be spent better elsewhere.

So why did so many people predict we’d be on the Moon? I believe they were too close to the project, too caught up in the enthusiasm to show how superior the US was to the Russians and too ignorant of how easy it is for the US government to make sweeping changes in spending on a whim. It’s far too easy for a single person to alter the course of technological spending. If you can’t show the results of a project on TV and say “look what we did” then the politicians that are backing that project don’t get re-elected. The entire technology investment process is perhaps a chaotic system. Small changes made by one or two individuals massively affect the outcome and the outcome can be massively different depending on lots of small factors that are in play when the initial decision is made. This means that nobody could have predicted when we’d put a base on the Moon. Sure, the Apollo project managers could generate a plan based on available resources, known risks and project goals but that plan is about the engineering, not about the fickle nature of the funding controlled by the US political system. It’s scary to think that so may potential technological advances could happen or not happen depending on which politician needs to make himself look favorable to a lobby group for a couple of months.

So will we go back to the Moon at all? I think we probably will, but I’m doubtful that the US government will foot the bill. We’re about to stop flying the Space Shuttle (Officially called the Space Transport System – hence the STSxx mission numbers) and we have no replacement. We’re using Russian boosters and systems to supply the International Space Erector set with food and other supplies. This is technology we were laughing at during the cold war. If we go back, my guess it will be with companies like SpaceX or perhaps Richard Branson will fund a new spaceline - Virgin Heavenly Bodies.

My Web Tools

I don’t spend a great deal of time online. Most of my computing is done between me, and an IDE that churns out compiled C++, C# or Java. So my rather mediocre set of tools is as follows.

For general communication, I'm still on email. I don’t Twitter and I don’t use text messaging much except with my sister in the UK (and more recently with my younger daughter who just got a phone). Speaking of phones, I don’t use that much either. I much prefer to send/receive email that I can process off line.

I do use MSN/Windows Messenger for IM at work and occasionally at home. Once again this is mostly a link to my sister in the UK but I've used it to keep up with the latest school scandals etc.

My web development tools are rather dated. I use MS FrontPage to build my web site which I do infrequently and WordPress for my blog. I didn't choose WordPress - it came free from my ISP and I decided to give it a go.

I most recently tried Google's Reader which accumulates RSS feeds quite well and I tried Twitter which is completely pointless and time wasting as far as I can tell. I also tried Flickr while we were in the residency but I doubt I'll use it again.

I have posted some images on Google Earth (via Panoramio) but again this was pretty much a one-time deal.

I'm not very creative and have pretty much no art skills so I tend to use the tools as they come configured. This means that I end up with the boring looking web site but at least it works and I don't have to spend any time tinkering with it.

So on the Internet tools scale which goes from zero at the John McCain end to 10 and the Dr. C end I'd say I was about a 3.

Voice Blogging

I tried out gabcast.com and posted a 15 minute segment on nothing much in particular. The concept of blogging by voice is interesting in that it allows more or less anyone to effectively have their own radio station. I'm not sure if this truly warrants a separate tool/service. I already have a blog and can post my audio clips there for the two people who might want to listen to them. Of course, if you are a famous scientist/politician/game writer/author/actress/etc I can see the attraction of potentially getting your message out 'in person' to millions of people - assuming those people know to visit gabcast.com and dig around for the keywords you inserted in your voice clip.

In terms of storage it's obviously not very efficient when compared to posting some text but storage keeps getting cheaper and there are plenty of cases where the actual person's voice (or voices if it was a conference call) has real value. A lot can be inferred by the intonation of a speaker's voice not to mention that you can provide pronunciation guides that do not require you to be a librarian to understand.

I found the implementation at gabcast.com to be a bit weak. There is no way that I can see to move a clip from one channel to another. It also refused to upload a file as either a Windows .wav format or as an MP3. They do have their own recording tool but I have multiple input devices and could find no way to tell it which one I wanted to use. I think that this is the simplicity vs. flexibility problem that we run into all the time with web tools. If you make them simple enough for the masses, the geeks get annoyed because they can't configure them the way they would like to. There was also no way to test if my input device was working other than to attempt a recording and then play it back. A simple green/red light would have been enough. A level indicator would also be nice - I'm assuming they have not implemented compression/limiting in the tool.

I do not see the business model. If this is the audio version of UTube, then I think they are a bit hopeful. gabcast does have the ability to record a conference call which could be very useful. You could use this to record an interview with your favorite famous person - assuming you can corner them for a while.

The concept of recording from my cell phone intrigued me and I was tempted to make a recording of my drive to work (yes, I do have a hands-free device to use) but I find it hard to think about what I'm saying and do almost anything else at the same time - a limited CPU bandwidth problem. So I don’t really approve of (me) driving whilst on the phone. There is also the issue that a recording of my drive to work would have no value at all unless I happened to see a crime being committed which is pretty unlikely out where we are in the boonies.

Overall, I like the idea that there is a simple way to record a voice blog and post it. I'm just not sure what I'd do with it.

In case you are bored enough to want to sample what I posted, the channel numbers are 21662 and 21664 and I'm registered as NigelT.

Spelling & Other Problems

For no particularly good reason, I occasionally review the stuff I've posted to my blog. I don’t post very often and most of the ones that make it there are some form of complaint. So blogging is therapy? Anyway, I usually write the postings in Word because my spelling is so awful. Once I've gotten rid of all the squiggly red lines I'm a happy camper and post it to the site. Re-reading a few of the posts reveals not only that I also have terrible grammar in places but that I apparently also use random words here and there. This crops up in all of my writing and allows me to identify my own work. If you plagiarize from me you get a sprinkling of stupid words in with the other stuff. This also shows up in comments that I put in the code I write. No, you didn’t read that wrong, it clearly says that I write comments in my code. It's a form of madness. By this point one or both of my readers may have thought ahead a bit and started a response telling me to turn on the grammar checker. I have that on but it's pretty easy to confuse it. Some of my longer, more wandering sentences live forever with green squiggly lines under them. A quick mouse-over reveals: "Fragment (consider revising)" which is what I do. I consider revising it and then move on. Once I've accumulated a lot of green squiggly lines and a few red ones under the words like 'blogging' which I can’t be bothered to add to the Word dictionary, the arrival of a real hint of a mistake is lost in the weeds. So if I type is instead of as or was or instead of wash or saw, Word hasn’t got a clue that I've goofed. So this is my candidate for an AI project - let's help Nigel get his writing in better shape. If you have a copy of "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White, you'll know that there are a whole bunch of rules that can be applied to writing so that it doesn’t read like crap. Surely those would be easy to code up in Prolog? Add to that some wisdom from a few hundred editors as to what sort of structure to use and I'm pretty sure you've got something useful. After all one human editor could easily find the goofs with a single pass. It's all about practice and recognizing the faults in what should be clean patterns or prose. That's supposed to be what AI systems are good at. Any takers?

Hydrogen-powered cars

There is a lot of talk and much advertising recently on the subject of water being expelled from hydrogen-powered cars instead of C, CO and CO2 (as well as the other stuff). This all sounds great. Fuel cells convert hydrogen and oxygen directly into electricity and water. How cool is that? Clean, simple and expensive. Oh sorry, that's supposed to be cheap except that it isn't. The cost is only one of the problems. There are two much bigger issues with hydrogen-powered cars and they have nothing to do with storing the hydrogen or how a hydrogen pump station will work or safety or even cost. The first issue is that electric cars cannot function directly from a fuel cell very well. The fuel cells are OK at generating a constant power level but cars need short peaks of power to get up to speed and this means you need some form of electrical storage. Until we get really huge capacitors with adequate life, we are stuck with rechargeable batteries and these are both heavy and costly to make in terms of pollution. The extra weight increases the mass of the car which means it needs more torque to accelerate and bigger brakes to stop. The batteries themselves are generally made from materials which are nasty pollutants if the batteries are not properly recycled and they need to be every year or so because the lifetime isn’t that great. Even if we ignore the battery issues - let's say we can make big enough super-capacitors in the next 5 to 10 years from materials like grass, corn and sea water; we still have to deal with making the hydrogen. Hydrogen is made (typically) by electrolysis. This is the process that uses an electric field to cause the H and O ions in a solution to migrate apart from each other towards the electrodes supplying the potential. This ion movement constitutes a current and requires energy to make it happen. In a big generation plant this means pulling lots of power from the grid or perhaps building a power station nearby. And the power station is fueled by what? That would be predominantly coal or gas in the US with a sprinkling of nuclear power thrown in so we don’t look too backward to the French. So the bottom line is that your nice new hydrogen-powered car might cause just as much of exactly the same pollution (C, CO, CO2, S, H2SO4, etc) as the gas-powered car does now. But as a purchaser you can walk with your head held high knowing that your tail pipe only spits out water.

Stephen Hawking on Ted

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/stephen_hawking_asks_big_questions_about_the_universe.html

Hawking asks all the big questions. It's always interesting to hear him speak. The pauses as he constructs his own thoughts allow us to ponder his commentary. I loved his comment: "Maybe we should patent the Universe ...". He obviously doesn't believe we've been visited by UFOs because he comments that they appear only to "Cranks and wierdos". He also observes that SETI has found nothing yet. So are we alone? He thinks that we should ensure that we try to survive and continue in case we are. He sees our resource usage as growing exponentially and our genetic disposition towards aggression as being serious problems. He thinks we need to expand into space.

"If we want to continue beyond the next 100 years we should continue in space."

He views his disability as helping him by providing time to ponder the big questions.

Hawking was asked if he thinks if we are alone. It took him seven minutes to answer: "I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years. The alternative is that civilizations don't last that long."

Excellent stuff.

Innovating or Exploiting?

While cruising around on ted.com I came across what looked like it might be an interesting video by Hector Ruiz called "The power to connect the world". I thought this might fit quite well with my whole rant about getting everyone informed about what's going on beyond their own villages. I had no idea who Hector Ruiz is and so I read his bio while listening to him introduce himself. Based on his own introduction, mannerisms and dress I was rather surprised to find out that he's the CEO of AMD and his mission is to promote a commercial project that AMD has going to get 50% of the World's population on the Internet by 2015. His initial talk, whilst very dull, seemed as though it might be altruistic in nature. AMD is a pretty big company and I thought perhaps they were trying to do some good. Alas this is not the case. As Ruiz points out several times during his uninspiring speech, AMD wants (presumably) to sell semiconductors to the companies who make backbone routers, switches, power supplies and so on but with the side-effect of somehow connecting half of the planet. Of his 18 minutes, he spent at least half of it working up to saying why it might be a good idea if Africa had good Internet connectivity. By 12 minutes I gave up and stopped listening. This leads to a couple of questions. First is how a man with so little presence could have become the CEO of a large international company. I know nothing of his skills as a business man but his ability to pitch what should have been a very cool idea makes me wonder how he pitches a business plan to his board. The other question is: why does AMD think it can help get coverage if all it's going to do is come up with a project name (50x15) and not fund anything? Surely Mr. Ruiz does not think this is an original idea? Many people have proposed getting more people connected to help counter the effects of local propaganda and any educator on the planet could do a pitch for why the Internet might be useful in a general educational sense. All in all this was very disappointing and also rather boring. Such is the way of business at AMD I suppose.

Black on White

I've scored two for two so far visiting blog sites that use white letters on a black background: http://mechanicalmongeese.com/ and http://ctusoftware.blogspot.com/. Is this some sort of trend? I hope not because I find reading these 'colorful' sites more tiresome than those with more conventional black on white text or at least some sort of very dark font on lightish background. Perhaps the CS types are more prone to using some color on black because the early electronic terminals were like that. My earliest terminals were definitely black on white - and that's black ink stamped onto white paper. Later we graduated to black ink punched with little wires onto white paper with green lines in the background (the origin of the green lines like mini music staves is a mystery). Along the way these mechanical terminals got a bit faster - all the way to around 120 characters per second. Somewhere in the 70's (or perhaps a bit earlier - I'll have to find out) we got super whizbang electronic terminals which used a CRT (look it up yourself) to show green or orange text on a dark background. The background was actually a grayish color but it looked black by comparison to the brightly glowing text. We started with 24 rows of 40 characters which seemed pretty good at the time. Somewhere in the 80's there were a few attempts to make black text on white backgrounds using the electronic terminals but the focus of the CRTs wasn't that hot and the resolution and contrast tended to be a bit poor so the overall effect was like trying to read a newspaper that had a very bright light behind it. Today I have several very nice flat-panel monitors which do black on something-a-bit-like-white quite well. The whites aren't white of course and vary a great deal between manufacturers. Despite the ability to set the color temperature, color balance and so on, it's still very hard to get them all to look like the same white. Overall though it's better. The result is better than the 110 baud teletype I started with in the 70's and it's getting to be somewhere near the quality of printing that any printer could do 50 years ago.

Book review: "As the Future Catches You" by Juan Enriquez.

I have two views of this book. The first is that is rather tedious to read, lacks scientific accuracy (especially with regard to physics) and is very much in line with the post-AOL merger CNN - it goes for the shocking not the real news.

The second view is that it obviously took a lot of work to assemble this data and as the author notes at the end, the research provided enough material for three 'real' books (his term not mine).

Overall this is a lot like Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth". There are a lot of facts which we could dispute but which I think are probably mostly correct. There is a lot of interpretation which is probably a lot less accurate because it's the interpretation that requires the skill, knowledge, wisdom and genius. Mr. Enriquez makes a lot of very bold statements that are based on a very few facts - taken totally on their own merit. How many of these facts turn out to be causal in terms of global change we'll have to wait and see. He's certainly got some good bets. His analysis of education in the US vs. other countries is a sad trend that has been known about for years. Are we going to change any of that? Perhaps - but we'll need to shut of ESPN and get of the couch first and that may just be too hard.

He comments that most doctors will be focusing on prevention rather than cures in the future. I've got news. They have been doing that forever but nobody is listening. The very people that could do with a little prevention are happy to eat at McD's, watch TV all night and don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom. Your doctor can’t affect cultural change. What we need is a good TV virus so we can get back to doing other things like talking to each other - in person, via email or in SecondLife - your choice.

I found a lot of small 'facts' with rather distorted physics and Computer Science. Since these are areas in which I have an interest, it leads me to wonder if a biologist might find similar problems. Perhaps a chemist would too. Perhaps he sold out to AOL and no longer reports accurate news but rather focuses on ratings. Perhaps I am being too harsh. It is impossible to find one person that can be perfectly knowledgeable in all areas, yet books like this tend to be popular with those who see themselves as scientifically informed but who do not know what the difference between Silicon and Silicone is. These people will reproduce this material at parties - with just a slight variation and we'll be into another 'global warming' debate pretty soon. This time the focus will be on whether you want your genes to be inserted into pigs. It's (possibly) wonderful that we might get new hearts without the need to extract them from other people but how much like you do you want pigs to become?

As a test, I asked my 11 year-old daughter to open the book anywhere, read a bit and tell me what she thought. She sat reading quietly much longer than I expected. Her summary was that it was "mostly about old people" and that it was "a bit weird". So, no Earth-changing party conversation piece there and I suppose that means I could be wrong about the whole thing but, like Mr. Enriquez, I'm pretty confident that I have it correct.

Voice Blogging

I tried out gabcast.com and posted a 15 minute segment on nothing much in particular. The concept of blogging by voice is interesting in that it allows more or less anyone to effectively have their own radio station. I'm not sure if this truly warrants a separate tool/service. I already have a blog and can post my audio clips there for the two people who might want to listen to them. Of course, if you are a famous scientist/politician/game writer/author/actress/etc I can see the attraction of potentially getting your message out 'in person' to millions of people - assuming those people know to visit gabcast.com and dig around for the keywords you inserted in your voice clip.

In terms of storage it's obviously not very efficient when compared to posting some text but storage keeps getting cheaper and there are plenty of cases where the actual person's voice (or voices if it was a conference call) has real value. A lot can be inferred by the intonation of a speaker's voice not to mention that you can provide pronunciation guides that do not require you to be a librarian to understand.

I found the implementation at gabcast.com to be a bit weak. There is no way that I can see to move a clip from one channel to another. It also refused to upload a file as either a Windows .wav format or as an MP3. They do have their own recording tool but I have multiple input devices and could find no way to tell it which one I wanted to use. I think that this is the simplicity vs. flexibility problem that we run into all the time with web tools. If you make them simple enough for the masses, the geeks get annoyed because they can't configure them the way they would like to. There was also no way to test if my input device was working other than to attempt a recording and then play it back. A simple green/red light would have been enough. A level indicator would also be nice - I'm assuming they have not implemented compression/limiting in the tool.

I do not see the business model. If this is the audio version of UTube, then I think they are a bit hopeful. gabcast does have the ability to record a conference call which could be very useful. You could use this to record an interview with your favorite famous person - assuming you can corner them for a while.

The concept of recording from my cell phone intrigued me and I was tempted to make a recording of my drive to work (yes, I do have a hands-free device to use) but I find it hard to think about what I'm saying and do almost anything else at the same time - a limited CPU bandwidth problem. So I don’t really approve of (me) driving whilst on the phone. There is also the issue that a recording of my drive to work would have no value at all unless I happened to see a crime being committed which is pretty unlikely out where we are in the boonies.

Overall, I like the idea that there is a simple way to record a voice blog and post it. I'm just not sure what I'd do with it.

In case you are bored enough to want to sample what I posted, the channel numbers are 21662 and 21664 and I'm registered as NigelT.

Nigel

Unreliable software

I've had to temporarily move my blogging to here because the wordpress installation on my own web site at www.nadtec.to has mysteriously stopped working. I've already wasted a few hours trying to figure out why it's stopped after months of happy operations. In frustration I'm blogging here now.