Rusty's Blog

If you haven’t heard of it by now, you could probably be accused of living under a rock. Possibly in an effort to save yourself from space junk.

A little over a week ago, an astronaut at the space station was working with a tool bag, and reportedly the grease gun in the bag popped. The report sounds a bit suspect to me, but for whatever reason the tool bag in question drifted out of reach of the astronaut, and ended up floating away.

Ever since then I have been seeing reports of people on the ground spotting the bag in orbit. Personally I suspect that it is at the top of the list of orbiting objects being searched for on ‘http://www.heavens-above.com/’ or it will be soon. Actually I suspect that most people who go out looking for it will miss seeing it entirely.

Why? Well, to be honest most people who go out looking for the tool bag in orbit won’t know what to look for. Reeportedly the object is showing up as a magnitude 8 object. For people who are thinking that means it must be pretty bright, a minor bit of explanation. Astronomical objects are described as appearing to have a brightness relative to a theoretical magnatude -1 star. For a detailed explanation, see http://www.stargazing.net/David/constel/magnitude.html

The relationship of each level of magnitude is the base of the natural logorithm. e. For unenhanced or ‘normal’ vision, the brightness of stars in the sky in a rural area on a clear night is from Sirius at -1 down to magnatude 6 stars. The dimmest of the stars normally seen in the constelation ursa minor is 5.4.

This means that if you live in the city, even if you have really good eyes, and a solid understanding of the type of flight path that the tool bag should have, it is very unlikely that you will see a magnitude 8 object.

If you know what to look for, exactly where to be looking, and a good pair of binoculars, it’s possible that you could see the tool bag.

I’ll be honest though. I think there are a lot of other things out there in the night sky that are just as interesting to look for, and a whole lot easier to see. Watch for Iridium satelites. These are satelites that were put into polar orbits that just happen to have features that do an absolutely wonderful job of reflecting the sun as they fly overhead in orbit.

The Space Shuttle and the International Space Station are both highly visiable when their orbit is over head during the appropriate times of the evening and morning.

And at various times during the year, the sky puts on some absolutely wonderful fireworks shows worth spending hours watching. Meteor showers, and after a CME Aurora events are both often spectacular.

But if you really do want to see the Tool Bag, I would suggest doing a bit of research. At some point, probably in about 2 years, the bag will re-enter the atmosphere. I haven’t heard a lot of information one way or the other, but I would suspect that it will mostly burn up on re-entry, and very likely will put on a brief, but bright, show. If you are in the right place, and alert at the right time, I strongly suspect that it will be very visiable.

Promotion

I don’t often do this, but here goes. As I’ve noted a few times in the past, I am involved with the CONvergence science fiction and fantasy convention held over the first full weekend of July. I’m also a fan of Jonathan Coltan. If you don’t know who he is, I’d suggest digging yourself out from that rock I mentioned earlier.

In any case, there is an open request out there for Jonathan Coltan to be ‘demanded’ as an appearance at CONvergence. See <a href=”http://eventful.com/performers/P0-001-000132714-3/demands”>the eventful.com page</a>

I’m not getting any money for the link. I don’t work for Eventful, and while I do a lot of work for CONvergence, it is part of a non-profit. If I get anything out of this promotion it’s the opportunity to see John perform or appear at the CONvention, and even that’s not gauranteed for me. (Potential wor schedule concerns are cropping up.)

I would appreciate it if you would add your voice to the demand requests. But if you’re not interested, that’s fine too.

Have a great Thanksgiving day, and a wonderful weekend.

I’ll admit that when it comes to technolgy, I’m somewhat biased. I’m hoping that in this post that while I am coming at it from that perspective, that my thoughts result in a balanced result.

I don’t think that there is a means of making a living today that doesn’t take advantage of technology in one way or another. While it’s fairly obviously true in the US, I actually think that it’s universally true. Even when you consider subsistence farming and hunting and gathering, we end up using technology in one form or another to give ourselves the advantage we need to survive.

Take gathering as the most basic. You walk to where your source of food is, and pick berries or pull up roots. It becomes fairly obvious after a very short period of time that the trip back and forth from where you are living, to where your food happens to be growing is introducing you to the risk of a preditor of some sort. Be it a bear, wildcat, wolverine, wolf, or something else, you are not set up with the same level of strength, or hunting implements (teeth, claws, eyesight, etc.) that are going to give you a particular advantage against one of these guys. So you’re going to want to do something to reduce that risk. There are two ways to solve this issue, carry something to defend yourself with, and make more trips because one hand is occupied with carrying that weapon or shield, or find some way of carrying more of what you are gathering, and cut down on the number of trips, and therefore the overall risk. Besides if you only make one trip out for food, rather than 4 or 10, there’s all that time you were spending gathering food that you can spend developing critical social skills, or better yet procreating. (And demonstrating that you’ll be around to help raise those kids you are busy procreating as well.)

Either carrying a weapon, or finding a way of carrying more food is going to result in a technological solution. You created a tool that makes you more productive in one way or another. And while having to make more trips because you are only able to use one hand may seem like a loss, the fact that you have a way to defend yourself also means that it is more likely that you will be comming home at the end of those extra trips.

Your first first solution to carrying more at one time may be to use a large leaf as a simple basket. Or after carrying a weapon for a while you might discover that the skin of one of those creatures you were defending yourself from makes for a good basket as well, or even a sling. Who knows.

Fast forward to today. the technology we wor with today includes far more than just a better hammer or a basket to carry things in, but they all are an effort on the user’s side to get more done with less work done from the user’s point of view to improve the working situation. It even gets into the world’s oldest profession, where a hooker can advertise her services online, and make arrangements for where and when to meet. She can check out the John ahead of time, as well as the location, and know far more about what’s going to happen. She doesn’t have to stand on the corner trying to make eye contact with prospective John’s on the street. (This is not to be taken as an advocacy for prostitution, just an example of how pervasive technology ends up being.)

All technology is information handling. From the latest computers and high speed network infrastructure, down to the basket of berries and point of the knife or spear. They are all means of demonstrating that you have some idea for getting ahead, and can make use of that idea to solve the problem at hand.

In the 1960s the LASER was developed. LASER stands for Light Amplification through Stimulated Emission of Radiation. For a long time it was described by naysayers as a solution in search of a problem. And while there are some ‘problems’ that lasers have solved that might be considered a real stretch of credibility, the reality is that they handle more information in one day today than all the computers built before 1999 handled between the development of the jakard loom and the latest computer of 1999 combined.

Technology and information handling today are the foundation of all business. “Products!” I hear you shout. Ok, without products to sell, you won’t make any money. But what are ‘Products’? They are transformed raw materials. A Car is a large chunk of a variety of metals, oils, plant and animal byproducts, all processed by technology and the know-how to use that technology, (added information) to produce a car. We sure as hell don’t fart them, or find them growing on trees. (Money does grow on trees by the way. As any orchard owner can attest. But if he’s going to be profitable, he’s going to have to employ some hard won knowledge either of his own or of a hire.)

There seems to be a strange view showing up in business these days. The view is that technology is a cost for the business. I can understand a part of this view. If your business is moving packages from one location to another, or better a lot of locations to a lot of locations, you use tools to perform that movement. For small packages, it might be an individual acting as a courier. For larger packages, it might be a truck driver and truck of some sort.

In theory that isn’t very complicated. How difficult can it be to take a package across the street? Follow a FedEx package across the street some day, and you might be surprised. Perhaps you’re wondering why you should pay FedEx to take the package from your receptionist, put it on a truck down town, another out to the airport, a flight to Memphis, another flight back, onto another truck back to the local city office, and then out to your neighbor across the street? Especially when you could hire your next door 8 year old kid to take the package across the street, and all it will cost is a piece of candy from the candy dish. The thing is, the FedEx solution will cost the same, and take the same amount of time (within reason) regardless of whether the destination is across the street, or across the continent. The 8 year old is going to run into problems getting the next package across the continent. FedEx has a technological solution that scales well for their defined problem set. Deliver the package anywhere in the US, overnight.

That’s the thing with technology. A solution that looks expensive for one set of problems may turn out to be the lowest cost general solution. And trying to undercut that cost may result in you having a surprise in follow-on costs that you did not prepare for.

Another way of looking at that is to note that there is nothing particularly difficult about owning an orchard. Let’s assume that the cost of labor is fixed. As is the cost of shipping the fruits of your orchard to market. The question comes up then, how do we maximize our profit, or maximize sales. Better yet, is there a way to maximize both profit and sales? While the cost of shipping is ‘fixed,’ the qustion comes up ‘how’ is it fixed? It could be on a per mile basis, no matter how much we ship, whether it is 1 lb, or 1,000 tons. Or it could be the same amount per lb, whether the product is shiped across the street, or across the continent. Worst case it’s a combination of both. Weight (or volume) and distance. In that case is the market down the street going to be more profitable than the one 2 states over? Well, if you and your 20 neighbors are the only people in the continent who have orchards producing Makintosh Apples, perhaps sending a bunch of small loads to markets a couple of states away you might be able to sell the apples at $10 a lb. rather than the $5 a lb. that you can sell them for at the roadside stand you set up next to the orchard.

Perhaps you can maximize the price per sale by developing a history of selling consistently good Apples. You personally go through the pecks of pick, and get the bad apples out of the barrel. This takes time, but in the end it means that where you might have been selling at $5 a lb, perhaps you can sell for $7 a lb instead. At that point you have to ask is the amount of extra effort and information added to the sold product costing more or less than $2 a lb. If it costs more than $2 a lb, then that should tell you not to perform that service. Right?

Back when I was going through school, a common case was posited that at some poing the effort and costs associated with identifying and repairing bugs needed to be compared to the added value for the end product. In other words if the cost of reparing the bug was low, and the value for resolving the bug was high, then you work on fixing the security issue. If not, then ignore that bug.

A lot of that changed as companies realized not fixing those bugs ended up exposing the company to some very high risks. If you failed to work towards a fix for that bug, and someone found an exploit, you personally or as a company may be held liable for the damage that some script kiddy does on your systems. Not because you are at fault for doing whatever it is that the script kiddy initiated, but because you are responsible for not properly securing your computer.

This gets into a whole slew of issues with technology that I won’t delve into too much here, but what I hope is simple to understand is that providing a technologically advanced and competitive means of doing businesses is not without it’s costs, both up front, and over the long term.

Schools have learned this the hard way. Someone suggests spending $1000 per child on computers for the students this year, and that will give them a significant advantage in learning. And yes that part is true. Actually it’s more true that if you spend money on technology with a plan for how to implement it in a educational system to make it possible for children to learn more, and you follow through, then they will. The long term problem has always been that this is not a one time expense.

When it comes to text books, you buy 60 copies of the $50 text book for your two 30 student classes, or perhaps three 20 student classes if you are really fortunate, and those text books can be expected to survive through between 5 and 7 years of classes. Likewise for film projectors, Televisions, and so on. That’s not the case with computers. If you spend $1000 on a computer today, next year you couldn’t get $100 in return for it, even if you never opened the box. That might be an exageration, but I can assure you that in 3 years the computer will cost more to get rid of than you can sell it for. Additionally most classrooms are dusty environments that will end up filling your computers with enough dust to cause significant problems for that computer, both in heating related issues, as well as with potential for electrical shorting across power elements of the computer.

This carries over into the business world as well. computers are machines that require regular maintenance. We have not yet gotten to the point where computers will clean themselves. A significant portion of a business budget needs to be spent to regularly go through the computers in it’s inventory and make sure that supported hardware, software, drivers and so on are all in good condition. Patches being provided by manufacturers and operating system vendors need to be reviewed for problems, distributed, and validated, That takes money. And it will cost a business a fairly significant amount to ignore. There will be down time, and that needs to be kept track of as a part of the cost of doing business. Some of the down time can be managed around. Tracking recurrent issues and woring with vendors to identify the cause and providing effective prevention needs to happen, but to do that requires people who are familiar enough with the situations involved to be able to perform those reviews, and also the resources of time and money for them to complete those preventative actions.

Remember that the goal is to be competitive. Whether that means having more customers, or more cash flow, or some other element of measurement, it fundamentally means getting customers to want to do business with you, and to get them to tell their friends how great it is to work with you. You can’t do that if your goal for technology is to reduce it’s cost 10% overall, year to year, without providing a plan for reaching that goal. Additionally if you are increasing your profitability 5% a year, and technology is fundamental to that growth, then while you can easily get rid of 10% of the people and technology costs associated with your business over the next year, you have to consider whether removing that 10% of a fundamental element of your company is going to leave you with a 15% growth this next year, or are you going to still see a 5% growth in profit next year with a 10% loss in revenue.

Stockholder value is based most often on the combination of profit and revenue. If you earn $500 in profit this year and your costs were $5000, then your revenue has to be $5500. A 5% growth in profit would mean $525 in profit next year. However if you cut $500, (10% od $5000) then your total revenue would be $5025. A loss in revenue of $475. You met both goals of increasing profits, and decreasing costs, but the total value dropped by almost 10% as well. If there are 500 shares of stock in the company, then you have actually cost the stock holders more than your increase in profits would predict.

Now that might be where you want to go. I’m just not convinced that it is the best business model.

The reality is that we all want our technology to cost less, and produce more. Whether that means the ability to sell more potato chips from the same amount of raw material and number of people on the production line, or that means that the technology results in a product that tastes better and lasts longer, and is therefore of more interest to customers, there will be different types of costs involved. Technology does not provide a free ride. And at times the costs associated with one technology will not result in better value in the end product. But those are the real business decisions. ‘Cutting Costs’ is almost always going to result in reduced revenue. There are times when that will be desired. But it should not be the primary goal of any department head.

Then again, what do I know. I’m a fan of technology, and I work with it every day at work doing what I can to provide improved stockholder value. Sometimes I succeed, other times, not so much.

Back a few years ago, I started buying my music on CD. I happen to be old enough to remember my folks buying 8-tracks, I had a 45 player. Actually I had a 78 player, but those were not in record stores any more by the time I was born, aincient I may be, that old I am not. The 78 player was one of my grandparents opening space in their home and I was currious enough about the stuff that I got to take it home with me.

I don’t know if there is a 45 record anyplace in my collection of ’stuff’. I’m kind of hoping not. Mostly because the conditions they would have to be in are not exactly good for the records. I do know I have some LPs (33 1/3 rpm vinyl) that I’m hoping are not in truely horrid condition, though I’m not going to suggest that they have been treated the best either.

I think I bought my first CD in 1984. I was stationed in Germany, and had bought a ‘midi’ system. (Nothing to do with the Musical Instrument Digital Interface platform.) I bought a Techniques CD player at the same time, and started building a small collection of CDs. Along the way I’ve lost a few due to various incidents, and a few have just gone missing. It’s not like I haven’t had kids or something right?

In any case I’ve been amassing a bit of a collection. Nothing like some people build, and I don’t expect to be hosting a radio station really worth listening to any time in the future, but I wouldn’t want to have to try to dig through the collection to find a specific CD any time soon either.

Back in the late 90’s I picked up my first MP3 player. A 6 gig Archos hard disk based player. I had already converted a few of my CDs to a small MP3 collection as I wanted to listen to a randomized playback without having to pay a couple hundred bucks for a cd jukbox, and having to wait for disks to change, and mechanical parts to fail, etc. I was using BeOS, and the ripped collection easily fit on the Archos drive at the time.

I looked at the various file sharing applications over time. Napster included, and decided for my own reasons that I really wasn’t interested in having copies of music I wasn’t willing to buy the CD for. I know that it was not a decision everyone made, but that was mine. And I continued to buy CDs from time to time.

I bought a lot of used CDs over the years. For the better part of a decade I would visit music stores and look for a couple of CDs that had disappeared, or been broken. and replaced most of them. At one point I had ripped my collection to over 13 gigabytes of 384kbps MP3’s. I got to thinking about my listening environment, and decided that I really didn’t need my collection to be at that high a bit-rate. So I re-ripped the entire collection back down to 128k, and left it at that. Along the way I discovered that some of my CDs had been revised on the various cd databases that the rippers were using, and some which had not been there before happened to match newer albums that didn’t happen to be in the same genera. So a bit of manual updates being used from time to time.

Over the years I’ve used a variety of MP3 players. Anything from devices that look like a USB key drive that a pair of headphones plug into the side, on up to my Nokia N800 with 2 16 gig sdhc cards in it. I have had a cell phone that had a built in MP3 player (SK-3), a Samsung Nexus XM player that worked as an mp3 player as well, and more than enough software MP3 players. There are a couple of other players here and there, but for the most part I’ll be ‘done’ with the hardware players fairly soon now.

The only significant problem I have with MP3, has nothing to do with the players themselves. Though carrying around special purpose devices that only play mp3 files seems to me to be a bit of a waste of resources at the moment. Perhaps not as bad as devices that need a special headset adapter perhaps, but that’s a different matter.

Back to what my biggest problem is, it’s that the encoder’s are pattent encumbered. Well, players are as well, but I’m buying the player from a retailer or manufacturer who is paying the licence fees for that player out of the sales price. Under Linux, I’m not buying the encoders. So any MP3 encoder I end up using also happens to be in violation of the patent that is applicable. I don’t expect that I’m likely to be taken to court over it any time soon over the matter, but it is a thorn in the side. A ‘legal’ way for me to circumvent the issue would be to play the audio through a sound card, into one of my Haupauge PVR-250 cards and capture to MPEG, then strip the MP3 audio out of the MPEG file. That encoder I presume is paid for in the cost of the hardware itself. Personally I think that’s a lot of excess work that I’m not interested in doing, especially as there are other ways of accomplishing the same goal.

Remember that the Goal is to have the opportunity to listen to the music I own the CD’s for. I’m not trying to resell any of them. I’m not trying to hand out copies to all my friends, or my family. Just me, listening when and where I would like, preferably without hauling around 20 pounds of CDs.

Obviously I could install a CD Jukebox in my car, duplicate the collection of CDs I have by buying another copy of each one, and so on. You know, I don’t think that’s a reasonable solution. It doesn’t help me when I ride the bus to and from work. It doesn’t help when I’m at work, etc.

A few years back, someone else who wasn’t happy with the situation regarding the pattents related to MP3 developed a new encoder, called Ogg Vobis. (or Vorbis, not sure at the moment) There’s another solution for video called Ogg Theora. (again, I think that’s the title.) They both do a very good job of encoding and playing back music and video, however there hasn’t been a lot of hardware on the market that has support built in for it. One odity related to that is the N800. This device is built around a Linux kernel and platform. Ogg has been available for almost all varients of Linux, but Nokia decided that there was insufficient demand for Ogg to include it in the software included in the N800. Now there are some reasonable explanations for this, in that the device does have a limited amount of space, but since the device supports full motion video and more, there are people who are not particularily happy about the situation. Yes, some people have ported the necessary libraries, and it would be reasonably easy to get them to work, but for most people it’s not really worth the effort.

Last week I bought a new cell phone. I like a lot of what the iPhone has to offer, but really don’t like the idea of having to do almost all update processes through iTunes. (If for no other reason than I don’t want to fight with trying to get that to work under Linux.) However Google anounced the Android cell phone platform specification some time back, and about 2 weeks ago T-Moble started selling the HTC Dream G1 in broad distribution. It’s no more for ‘everyone’ than the iPhone is. And I don’t expect the G1 to be an iPhone killer. However it does provide significantly more service than my previous combination of cell phones, N800, and ‘disposable digital’ camera provided. Mostly because with 1 device I have taken care of all three of those resources, as well as my GPS, and a few other things that I am hoping it will work out for. It won’t be a remote head for my ham radio gear, but…

One of my co-worker’s is a musician. He just released a new CD, of which I bought a copy. I went to rip it so I could listen (again without having to cary the CD itself around) and the CD-ripping software on the computer I used didn’t support ripping to MP3. Flaac and Ogg though are both supported. Again since I’m not too concerned about compression artifacts, I chose the ogg format and once the tracks had been ripped I copied them over to my phone figuring that at worst it would work as a way of getting the tracks home.

I disconnected the phone from the computer, and pulled up the music player. Now if you guessed that with all that I wrote above I was disapointed to find that the song’s were not in the collection the player would handle, you need to re-look at the title of the posting again. Yes it did work. I wasn’t expecting it to, but the Android platform is built around a Linux kernel and they did include the ogg libraries.

So, it’s time to go back to the collection of CDs, and start ripping them again. This time to ogg. I may not be able to do all that much with the podcasts I listen to, however there are a couple that do distribute in ogg.