Month: August 2004

Joey's got a great thread going. To introduce a non-Canadian thread to the kind of music that was popular in the mid-to-late eighties, he's asking for suggestions for songs to put on a CD he can send to this friend. He's not looking for the big hits — the Bryan Adams and Tom Cochranes of the world. Instead, he's looking for those offbeat hits that really gave the era its character.
I spent most of the 80s as a club DJ in Guelph, Ontario (first at the Bullring at the University of Guelph and then as the DJ that opened up the Trasheteria on MacDonnell in Guelph). Many have already chimed in at Joey's blog with some of my favourites but here's some more of what I really like from that era. (All but the Slow pick were also dance floor successes, as well, believe it or not).

Blue Peter – “Don't Walk Past” and “Take Me To War”
Slightly retro but fun: FM – “Phasors on Stun”
Martha and the Muffins – “Echo Beach”
Slow – “Have Not Been the Same”
The Government – “Flat Tire”
Diodes – “Tired of Waking Up Tired”
Forgotten Rebels – “Surfing on Heroin
Demics – “New York City”
David Wilcox – “Hypnotizin' Boogie”

Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the “I” in internet.
At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net.
Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was
Wired News Online, August 16, 2004
To which I say, sure there was and still is.
Why capitalize Internet? It is a proper noun and proper nouns are always capitalized. Why should it be a proper noun?

• There is only one Internet and it has special and unique characteristics that differentiate it from other electronic networks. Some other electronic networks that also have special and unique characteristics are proper nouns. E.G. CANet, Arpanet, Internet 2.
• Other electronic networks are not unique. The public switched telephone network, for example, differs in both its physical layer and communication layer from place to place. The Internet is a global network that has unique physical and technological characteristics.
• Like many proper nouns, there is no plural form. You can not speak about Internets.

Why capitalize Web and Net?

• The Net is a short form for Internet. If you capitalize Internet, you should capitalize Net.
• The Web is short for World Wide Web, a specific software application which runs on the Internet. (A style note: Web and Net are not interchangeable. They mean different things.) You would no more say you typed an essay using Microsoft word than you would say you downloaded a web page. Do gamers extoll the virtues of doom, everquest, or pac-man?

Incidentaly, my 1998 Globe and Mail style book has Web and Internet although since that edition was published style mavens at the Globe now prefer Internet and web. The New York Times style gurus, on the other hand, still choose Internet and Web.
The Chicago Manual of Style, incidentally, has some nice entries related to this issue and other quandaries for those trying to use the right style when, for example, reporting on video games in a scholarly or magazine article.
(FWIW, Chicago uses Web site and Internet . . .)
Meanwhile, the Slashdot geeks are kicking this vitally important issue around — and the geeks have some interesting insights.

Apple Computer was first off the mark when it comes to computers you can hold in the palm of your hand. Apple's Newton, though, was too far ahead of its time, the pundits said. I never got to try a Newton. I have, however, used lots of handhelds from Palm, the company that really drove the whole PDA and handheld revolution. Indeed, I still have a functioning original Palm Pilot. (One reason the Newton may have lost out to the Palm Pilot might have been size. Hard to fit a Newton into your shirt pocket.)
Investors and fans of Apple have long wondered why Apple, with its strong history of excellent design, didn't get back into the handheld market. Well, maybe they are. The Register reports that Apple has filed design trademarks for what looks like a wireless tablet, an iBook, if you will, without a keyboard. Apple, as it always does, declines to comment on any products it might or might not be developing.

Today's Globe and Mail has my profile of Mike Thewalt, a physicist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. Thewalt's a neat guy and his work on the spectroscopy of silicon helped him get the nod as Canada's physicist of the year:

Physicist of the year
Mike Thewalt started out fiddling around with chemistry, but after almost blowing himself up when he was 16, he switched disciplines. It was a good move. His insights into silicon are causing a buzz.
BURNABY, B.C. — Thirty-eight years after he blew up his basement bedroom fiddling with a German chemistry kit, Mike Thewalt scratches his head, grins and tries to explain the wonders of isotopically pure silicon.
Dr. Thewalt is, by trade, an experimental physicist and, by rank, a professor in the physics department at Simon Fraser University. He has been fiddling around for years now with silicon, the world's most common semiconductor.
In fact, he's so good at fiddling around that he is the 2004 winner of the Canadian Association of Physics Medal of Honour, a kind of MVP award for the country's physics establishment ….[Read the full story]

The print version of the story has a great picture of Thewalt in his lab at SFU. It's taken by John Lehmann, who is one of my favourite photographers when it comes to shooting profile shots. Sadly, the article and photo are not on a colour page in the paper (despite advances in newsprint printing technology, they're still rare and expensive) but I suspect what John saw was an even stronger version than what ended up running.

I was once told by some technicians at Atlantic Canada phone company Aliant that to get television signal over DSL, you needed about 6 megabits-per-second of bandwidth. At the time of this conversation, Aliant was testing out its Vibe home Internet service in some parts of Moncton, New Brunswick, which was pushing 30 megabits-per-second (Mbps) to selected homes.
Vibe was subsequently discontinued which I thought was a shame but I digress …
I thought of that 30 Mbps service and the fact that you need bandwidth headroom of about 6 Mbps for TV when Reuters moved the following item. It seems the world is about to get 802.11n, which will offer peak wireless bandwidth of better than a half-a-gigabyte second. I thought 802.11g, which maxes out over 50-megabytes-second would be plenty. But half-a-gigabyte? How would we fill up such a big pipe? Wow.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A group of technology companies including Texas Instruments Inc. , STMicroelectronics and Broadcom Corp. , on Thursday said they will propose a new wireless networking standard up to 10 times the speed of the current generation. [Reuters: Technology]

If you're following the discussion about blogging and journalism, you've probably noticed that one of the things people talk about is credibility. One of the ways mainstream news organizations try to enhance and preserve their credibility is by making it clear to readers and viewers who pays the bills. For my employers, the sale of advertising space in the paper and time on our network pays my salary and the operating costs of our news organization. I'm pretty sure most readers and viewers understand that and are able to factor in the way we make our money when they decide how credible we are.
In fact, journalists themselves 'follow the money' all the time when we try to report on the motives or character of an individual, business, or government group. We do that because we believe that when our readers and viewers know, for example, that a drug company is paying university researchers to assess the safety of their products, readers are better able to assess the independence and credibility of the resulting study when they know who paid the bills for that study.
That's why I think it important that bloggers who wish to challenge mainstream journalism or criticize should make some disclosures of their own in the interests of letting their readers assess the potential for bias or conflict.
So, in that spirit, starting today, I'm walking the walk and talking the talk. You'll notice a new section midway underneath the photos on the right-hand at the bottom on the left-hand side of this blog. It's titled: “Who pays for this blog?” and you should see it there or in another prominent spot on this blog all the time.
I know of no examples or templates for this sort of thing so I just wrote it up trying to explain in plain language how I come to have the resources to publish this blog. If you think there are other things I ought to disclose or if there's something in that disclaimer that's not clear, I'd love to hear about it.

Peter Blackmore

Wow. HP CEO Carly Fiorina lowers the boom on executives at her company in charge of server sales after disappointing quarterly results in that area. In Canada, HP has been holding its own against Dell and IBM when it comes to servers — the powerful computers most often bought by corporate customers to power intranets and Web sites. But it's no secret that HP (and Sun, for that matter) have been losing ground to IBM and Dell in the server market. Peter Blackmore, one of the highest-ranking Compaq executives to stick around after the HP acquired that company, walked the plank for lousy performance of the server group.
You can listen to a Webcast held today by Fiorina and other company executives and get more information relevant to HP investors.
The folks at ZDNet have a good summation of the executive shuffle.

Richard Outerbridge writes in on a list I subscribe to to say that the calculator that is part of Apple's latest operating system, Panther, produced wrong results. Here's his post to that list:

The flagship Calculator application that ships with Apple's Panther is so sick as to be shameful.
Two examples:

• From basic mode enter 12,000,000.
  Go to Convert->Area… Choose “From: Square Inch” and “To: Acre”. Press OK. The displayed result is zero (0). Press '='. The displayed result is 1.44. The correct answer is actually 1.91307009488827.

• Go to View->Advanced. Try “10000/(2^32)”. The displayed result is 454.5454545454546^32. Press '='. Nothing changes. The correct answer is actually 0.00000232830643.

This could be the first piece of software that someone (that is, Apple) could get sued for, disclaimers of fit-for-purpose,
blah, blah, blah, all to the side.
It's utterly unreliable, yet seemingly so simple, basic and user-friendly!
Apple should make a special out-of-band update to their Calculator, if only to avoid the embarrassment of a prospective Windows switcher finding he can't get a Macintosh to even do basic math correctly, let alone relying on it for doing any “serious” day-to-day work.

One of the great things about Apple's calculator is its conversion engine, a handy tool when you need to do some currency conversion or convert feet to kilometres. If the mistakes discovered by Outerbridge make you nervous, here's an alternative to Apple's tool. It's called ConvertIt. Haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising.

The International Olympic Committee is permitting broadcasters to beam video of the Athens Olympics to computers and mobile phones next week, the first time the games will be shown online. [Technology Review Feed v2.1]

Americans have bought more than 100 million songs at Apple's iTunes music store but here in Canada we're still waiting for Apple to work out deals with record companies so it can sell music here. PureTracks, a homegrown online music store that sells for those using Windows has been doing a great business.
In the meantime, while Apple seems to be neglecting Canada, the Danes are going their iTunes store.

Apple plans to unveil a Danish version of the iTunes Music Store in October, a few days ahead of Mic… [MacNN]