Gump's Moved North

Where's Gump Been? We've misssed his thoughts and rants on gadgets, computers, Tiger and marketing.

Gump's been busy, moving north of the Mason Dixon line for the first time in my life. Over the past two weeks, I've sucessfully moved from Atlanta, which has been my home for the past eleven years to Pittsburgh, my new home.

So, goodbye Braves, grits and sweet tea. Hello Steelers, snow and Pepsi products.

I'm looking forward to writing here in Gump Rants about my move and the transition. So far, so good. The people in Pittsburgh are very nice and so far the weather has been incredible - absolutely incredible. (I do realize that it will change come November.)

So, until I get my DSL hooked up at home, expect more sporadic posts to the blog here. Which brings up a question - Cable Modem or DSL? I have welcome kits for both, now I have to decide which one to go with. That sounds like a topic for tomorrow.

-aB

Court Reporter Steno Machines...

Via Gizmodo, I've always wondered how those things the court reporters type on work. You would think that with all of the technology today, they would have found a way to update these things, but I guess if it ain't broke then don't fix it.

This Slate story talks about how the Stenotype machine works. Interesting. Snippet:

It's called a stenotype machine, and it's also used for captioning television broadcasts and general office stenography. The stenotype works a bit like a portable word processor, but with a modified, 22-button keyboard in place of the standard qwerty setup. Modern stenotypes have two rows of consonants across the middle, underneath a long "number bar." Set in front of these are four vowel keys: "A," "O," "E," and "U."

Now, the other thing I want to know is how surveying equipment works. Those little telescopes, the reflectors on sticks... Can't you do all of this with GPS now?

Enjoy.

-aB

PS3 + George Forman Equals...

Very funny.

Go to www.ps3grill.com.

-aB

Sony PS3 Officially Announced

This CNN story does a decent job of showcasing the new PlayStation, due out next spring. I've written here in this post about the Cell processor it will utilize, but this story goes into a bit more detail on the entire package.

Key Points:

• 35 times the power of the PS2


• More powerful than the current PS2, XBOX and GameCube combined


• Utilizes Blu-Ray disks


• Wireless bluetooth controllers - capacity to handle seven simultaneous controllers/players standard


• Ability to output two different signals to two different TVs (standard or high-def)


• Console will be initially available in silver, black and white


• Supports 1080p high definition format


• Supports interaction with the PSP handheld via wireless


• Supports Sony's Memory Stick Duo format as well as SD and CF cards

Pretty neat stuff. I was expecting it to look a bit cooler than the pictures show. Not necessarily disappointed, but not quite the "wow" I was anticipating.

But the specs do wow me.

-aB

Internet Explorer Falling Further Behind, In Several Ways

The gang at IBM dealt a blow to Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser today, announcing that they were making the FireFox browser available to their 300,000 employees. Snippet from Information Week:

Microsoft's Internet Explorer continues lose market share as more consumers and businesses adopt alternative Web browsers. Rival IBM on Friday became the latest company to embrace Mozilla's Firefox browser, making it available to 300,000 employees.

"IBM recognizes a bandwagon when it sees one," says Andy Jaquith, an analyst at the Yankee Group. "Besides, it's migrating its whole operation to Linux."

Firefox clearly has momentum. It has been downloaded more than 50 million times, and members of the open-source Mozilla project have provided funds for advertising to promote the browser. Firefox has features that aren't available in Internet Explorer. And some experts think it's more secure than IE, reason enough for businesses to consider it as an alternative browser.

CNN noted a few days ago that IE market share had dropped to less than 90% for the very first time. Information Week gave Firefox about 8% market share, and interestingly Apple's Safari browser 3% of the market (or virtually all Mac users out there).

This Information Week story announces that the new IE 7 will include tabs, a feature that Safari has had for years and a big differentiator for Firefox. Microsoft IE product manager Dean Hachamovitch realizes the mistake to wait so long for tabs as he explains, "I think we made the wrong decision here [not including tabs] initially, and we're making the right one now."

Sounds like the new IE 7 won't be in beta until this summer. I'd thought that they were shooting for a lot earlier than that. Another big feature in IE 7 that many are waiting for is the built-in RSS reader. I bet that it's going to get a lot worse for Internet Explorer before it gets better. Plagued with security flaws, slower speed and fewer features, Firefox is the best choice on a PC. Safari's still my favorite overall browser, especially the one built into OS X Tiger.

-aB

Finally An iPod FM Transmitter That Doesn't Suck

I am not a big fan of the iTrip, or pretty much any of the current stable of FM transmitters for the iPod. Their signal is just too weak. And unfortunately, I have to use a transmitter in my BMW to be able to listen to my iPod. (In my Infiniti, I have a cassette player, so I can use that adapter, but my BMW is the model year before they added the iPod functionality discussed at iPodYourBMW.com).

Well, I have finally found something that works. It's the Monster iCarPlay Wireless Plus. It works.

It's not wireless like the iTrip, but it more than makes up for that with the quality. You plug it into the cigarette lighter plug, and it broadcasts a pretty strong signal on any FM frequency you want. Plus, it charges your iPod while it works (and it's a smart charge to prevent overcharging the iPod battery).

Another good thing is that it pulls the audio signal from the dock connector, rather than the top earphone jack, so it's a clean "line audio" signal. Nice.

It costs $80, so it isn't cheap. But it's definitely the most powerful of the transmitters I've tried. I put it on the same frequency as Star 94-FM here in Atlanta, and it blew that Star 94 (and it's great mix of today's top hits!) way back to Jessica Simpson-ville. And if that's all it did, it would be worth the $80 price alone.

-aB

Is Music Industry's DualDisc Too Late?

Bought my first DualDisc music CD tonight. It's Dave Matthew's new "Stand Up." Good album.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the DualDisc format, it's a regular CD on one side, and a DVD on the other. One disc - just two different sides sandwiched together. This means that there is no writing on either side - the name of the album is written on the plastic center of the disc.

It's a great idea and captures a lot of the points that I brought up in this post way back in July 2004. It was a rant to the RIAA and the music industry that they needed to do something to convince people to purchase albums again (as compared to stealing/pirating them or legally purchasing music online).

I commented about what the dance/electronica music genre was doing - with cool packaging for their CDs, bonus CDs and sometimes even DVDs included with the album.

Read my old post here if you want to see what I said.

Well, DualDisc does a lot of these things. The jewel box is different from a regular CD. It's curved on one side and has a button on the front that you push to open the box. Cool. The first discs have decent liner notes, and the CD/DVD has good content on it. Not only does the DVD side feature videos and other extras, it also includes a surround sound 5.1 mix of the same album that's on the CD side. So playing it at home (or on new car with audio DVD players like most of the new Acuras).

Well it save the industry? I don't know about that, but it is the first actual tangible music CD I have bought in months. It's been iTunes for 95% of my music for the past few years.

-aB

It Isn't The Frisbee Dog Nationals, But It's Still Funny

I'm a big fan of the Frisbee Dog competitions, a Frisbee + Dog competition where the dogs (and their masters) do all sorts of crazy tricks. Every year at the Dogwood Arts Festival in basically my front yard at Piedmont Park in Atlanta, the dogs go at it. I love it because the dogs are having fun, the owners are having fun, and the crowds can't help from loving it - watching all of the craziness.

Well, this isn't the Frisbee dogs, but it's still pretty funny. This week over at Georgia Tech, the 2005 RoboCup U.S. Open was being held. The compeition ended with a bunch of programmed Sony AIBO robot dogs playing soccer. Snippet from CBS News/AP:

Hugging the sideline, the robot dog waddled down the field and hit a ball with its nose. The ball bounced off the goal post.

It was one of the University of Texas' last chances to get back in the game, which it eventually lost 2-0 to the reigning European champs from Dortmund University in Germany.

Robot dog soccer is one of five games that teams of scholars competed in during the 2005 RoboCup U.S. Open, held Monday at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The aim of the three-day competition, which ends Tuesday, is to develop software for better robots with the long-term goal of fielding a robot soccer team good enough to play a human team by 2050.

The compeition was close, but the team from Dortmund University in Germany won the match.

Read the entire story here.

-aB

Mac OSX Tiger's Dashboard Compromised

Via Slashdot, this post discusses a slightly dangerous and quite annoying vulnerability for Tiger's new Dashboard feature, the Konfabulator-copying new OSX eye candy that I've discussed here. Snippet from Slashdot:

If you're running Safari on OS X Tiger and go to this website, a 'slightly evil' Dashboard widget will be automatically downloaded and installed and can't be removed without manually removing the file from the Library folder and rebooting the computer. The widget is called Zaptastic and is a demonstration by the author of how easy it is to exploit Dashboard for nefarious purposes. The essay, released under the Creative Commons License, goes on to describe the many ways users can be taken advantage of...

The Web site discussed is Zaptastic. DO NOT go to that link if you're using Safari on a Mac with Tiger installed, unless you want to delete the downloaded widget yourself. It's not a necessarily "evil" widget, as the author's main purpose is to demonstrate the vulnerability.

Hope Apple fixes this soon. The whole idea that you aren't supposed to be able to delete widgets once you download them is rediculous. While if you can navigate down to the Widgets folder in your Home > Library, it does require a restart or two to truly clean them up. And Apple's help documentation says "You cannot remove widgets from the Widget Bar or change their order."

Boo, Apple. This is awful. I hope they fix this (as well as several other things) in 10.4.1. How did this get through testing?

-aB

Got Multiple Monitors? Meet Mandolux.

Found a wicked site tonight. Mandolux.com. It's from a guy named Mando Gomez who's a photographer that has created desktop images for people with multiple computer monitors.

At home, I am blessed with two honkin' 19" LCDs on my main computer. It's awesome - dragging windows onto both screens and truly being able to multitask.

Now, I've cropped and placed some of my own images onto my screens, but for those not fortunate enough to have their own, check out Mandolux.com. The archive section of the site has plenty of cool images to use.

P.S. I would show you some images from Mandolux.com but Mando gets a bit upset with bandwidth hogs.

-aB

Great Book for Mac Geeks

As I write this, my copy of the new Macintosh OS X operating system, code-named "Tiger" is on it's way to me via FedEx. This morning, The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg said about Tiger:

Overall, Tiger is the best and most advanced personal computer operating system on the market, despite a few drawbacks. It leaves Windows XP in the dust.

The new OS includes Spotlight, a very powerful search function that will change the way people manage their documents and data files, a new iChat video conferencing application that you need to see to believe, a RSS-enabled Safari Web browser that I blogged about here way back in June 2004 and Dashboard.

Dashboard is a great idea. Unfortunately, it's not a new idea. A piece of software called Konfabulator (one of my personal favorite shareware apps) has been doing the Dashboard thing for several years. Apple decided to "borrow" the idea without compensating Arlo Rose, the Konfabulator creator. Good news for Konfabulator is that it is now available for Windows and is more than worth the $24.95 they ask for it.

So sorry for the rant. Got carried away there. This post is about a book, "Revolution in the Valley - The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made." Andy Hertzfeld, one of the major brains behind the Mac compiled this book from stories on his Web site Folklore.org about the Mac, written by the actual people who built the original Mac. It's a pretty, coffee table-like book with lots of pictures and nice design. For those who have read the stories on Folklore.org, some of the chapters will be second-time reading, but even for me it was great the second time around. And it $24.95, it's actually a good deal for a hardback book with quality paper and spot color on every page.

I'm not sure if Steve Jobs has taken this book off the shelves of the Apple stores.

More on Tiger tomorrow...

-aB

Two Interesting Stories on Google

Via Slashdot, here are links to two interesting stories on Google and how it's impacting the Internet.

Snippet from The Globe & Mail:

Although it may seem that Google is already well-along the path toward such an information-rich Utopia, the truth is that the current state of affairs is only a first foray into the world of information retrieval. Today's smartest search algorithms still only read words as text strings, failing to make much sense (at least in the way a human would) of the ones and zeroes churning through their distributed server clusters. This lack of semantic connection is something being worked upon by the founder of the Web himself (Sir Tim Breners-Lee, at MIT) in a radical re-design of how the Web is structured and an update of the communication protocols that hold it all together.

And a snippet from Fortune:

Microsoft was already months into a massive project aimed at taking down Google when the truth began to dawn on Bill Gates. It was December 2003. He was poking around on the Google company website and came across a help-wanted page with descriptions of all the open jobs at Google. Why, he wondered, were the qualifications for so many of them identical to Microsoft job specs? Google was a web search business, yet here on the screen were postings for engineers with backgrounds that had nothing to do with search and everything to do with Microsoft's core business—people trained in things like operating-system design, compiler optimization, and distributed-systems architecture. Gates wondered whether Microsoft might be facing much more than a war in search. An e-mail he sent to a handful of execs that day said, in effect, "We have to watch these guys. It looks like they are building something to compete with us."

He sure got that right. Today Google isn't just a hugely successful search engine; it has morphed into a software company and is emerging as a major threat to Microsoft's dominance. You can use Google software with any Internet browser to search the web and your desktop for just about anything; send and store up to two gigabytes of e-mail via Gmail (Hotmail, Microsoft's rival free e-mail service, offers 250 megabytes, a fraction of that); manage, edit, and send digital photographs using Google's Picasa software, easily the best PC photo software out there; and, through Google's Blogger, create, post online, and print formatted documents—all without applications from Microsoft.

Good stories on a company who's corporate mantra is "Don't Be Evil." It's hard to put a fence around what Google is...today as well as tomorrow. It's certainly more than a search engine.

-aB

Scratch my back and I'll, wait a minute, do I have to?

Colleague of mine added 'ole GumpRants.com to his BlogRoll. Alan's a pretty nice guy, so I will reciprocate.

By the way, you gotta love the name - DogBrainCentral.

It looks so pretty down there in the BlogRoll, between The Onion and DPReview.com. There's juxtaposition for ya.

Kumbaya, my friend, kumbaya...

-aB

I Want One. No, I Need One

I have a little trouble getting up in the morning. I know how to divide by nine, which is number of snooze minutes my Sony clock radio "Dream Bar" will give me. I snooze for about 40-50 minutes (or actually 45-54 minutes to be precise) every morning.

Clocky from this MIT student is the solution to my problem. An alarm clock on wheels. Here's a snippet:

Before you hit the snooze button a second time on this alarm clock, you'll have to hunt it down.

The shag carpet-covered robotic alarm clock on wheels, called Clocky, rolls away and hides.

The clock is the invention of Gauri Nanda, a graduate student -- and a person who occasionally oversleeps -- who works in the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Looks kinda freaky with the shag carpeting. Make sure to keep all ferrets away from this device.

Read the entire story here.

-aB

Braves' Turner Field to Get World's Largest HDTV

Turner Field is about to get a new TV. 71 feet tall by 79 feet wide, it's a biggie.

Here's a snippet from DesignTechnica:

The world's largest outdoor high definition display (56,000 square feet) will greet and entertain Atlanta Braves fans at the newly renovated Turner Field this season.

The 5,600-square-foot Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Vision screen, which will be recognized by Guinness World Records at a special ceremony on March 23, is 71 feet tall and 79 feet wide, weighs 50 tons and has more than five million LED lights.

The new display consists of 266 panels that each contains 20 lighting units, resulting in a screen with nearly 5,200,000 LED (light emitting diode) modules that can faithfully reproduce 1 billion colors, and be clearly seen from almost any viewing angle.

When on, it needs about 400,000 watts of juice to keep it going. Let's just hope that the Braves have something good to put on the new screen this year.

Read the story here on DesignTechnica, via Gizmodo.

-aB

Another Great Pontiac Marketing Idea

The US is definitely behind the 8-ball when it comes to use of mobile phone technology, but a new campaign for Pontiac's new G6 sedan is perfectly timed, in my opinion.

I spoke about the G6 promotion with Oprah Winfrey here a few months ago, and complimented the program up and down. What I saw last night is just a clever and groundbreaking (at least for the United States).

I saw a commercial last night for the new Pontiac G6 "Catch a G6" viral/mobile campaign. Simple, but very clever campaign using the camera on most people's (at least in the G6 demographic) mobile phones. (I must admit, it's one of those "why didn't I think of that" ideas).

Basically, if you photograph a Pontiac G6 on the street with your cameraphone, send it into Pontiac (at the number/email provided), you are submitted into a drawing for $1 million, as well as a few G6 cars that they'll give away. Simple. Elegant. Great. Here's why:

• It gets people specifically looking for G6s on the road (a dream of auto manufacturers);
• It creates a database of potential GM buyers (and their cell phone/cell email numbers;
• It's viral buzz-worthy (people are talking about it);
• The site also features a G6 ringtone for your phone (I bet it sounds like the G6 exhaust);
• It speaks to the demographic of the potential G6 buyer, speaking to them with a marketing campaign that they see as "clever" and "sophisticated." People who likely aren't interested in a G6 won't "get it," but Pontiac could care less.

This is one of the most simple SMS-oriented promotions I've seen here in the US. And I bet it will be effective.

Visit the Pontiac promotion site here.

-aB

ESPN Interviews Malcom Gladwell

Not exactly your typical ESPN interview, but ESPN's Jeff Merron interviewed Blink and The Tipping Point author Malcom Gladwell just before the Super Bowl and asked him to translate his thinking into sports references.

It's a great interview, and Malcom's thoughts and theories make complete sense in a sports environment. Here's a snippet of an interview question about what advice from Blink he'd give the Eagles:

Well, it would be slightly terrifying to talk to the players, given that I'm, at my best, 135 pounds. So I'd settle for an hour with Andy Reid. I'd tell him the story from "Blink" about Millennium Challenge, which was the $500 million war game the Pentagon conducted in 2001. It was an elaborate dress rehearsal for the Iraq War, with one side "playing" the U.S. and another team playing Iraq -- and Iraq won. The chapter is all about how that happened, and it focuses on a retired Marine Corps General named Paul Van Riper, who was playing Saddam Hussein.

Van Riper won by speeding up the game. The team playing the U.S. had all kinds of computer programs and decision-making systems, and experts on every conceivable problem. But when the war started, Van Riper hit them with so many unexpected plays so quickly that he forced them out of that kind of conscious, deliberate decision-making mode -- and forced them to rely on their instincts. And they weren't prepared for that. Van Riper, in a sense, went to the "no-huddle" against his much more formidable opponent. And his experience shows that being good at deliberate, conscious decision-making doesn't make you good at instinctive decisions.

That's why I've always been so surprised that more NFL teams don't use the no-huddle. It's not just that it forces your opponent to keep a specific defense on the field. It's that it shifts the game cognitively: it forces coaches and defensive captains to think and react entirely in the instinctive "blink" mode -- and when teams aren't prepared for that kind of fast-paced thinking crazy things happen, like Iraq beating the U.S. Andy Reid has to know that Belichick has an edge when he can calmly and deliberately plot his next move. But does he still have an advantage when he and his players have to make decisions on the spur of the moment? I'd tell Andy Reid to go no-huddle at random, unpredictable points during the game -- to throw Belichick out of his comfort zone.

Good interview. Great book.

-aB

MapQuest Gets Trumped by Google

Google launced the beta version of its new mapping service today at maps.google.com.

And it's amazing. Smooth scrolling, drop shadows, live scrolling and zooming. It looks very Apple-like in the GUI. And that'a a compliment.

Unfortunately, the folks who would admire this the most - people using the Safari browser on the Mac, won't be able to see it yet. The site currently only works for IE and Firefox/Mozilla, according to Slashdot.

But if you're on IE, you're in for a treat. Check it out here. Sorry, MapQuest and Expedia Maps, you're going to have to evolve.

New Details on Sony PS3 Processor

Holy Crap. That's what I said when reading these specs.

Sony, IBM and Toshiba today announced some of the details of the Cell processor that they are all developing in collaboration. The PS3 will be the first application of this new smoker.

Now I don't know what all of this means, but I do know that big numbers are usually good and that these are some pretty big numbers:

• The processor operates at greater than 4GHZ.


• The processor is capable of 256GFLOPS. What that means is that the processor can handle 256 billion floating-point operations per second. That's billion with a "b" and per second as in, well per second. The Pentium 4 maxxed out these days is around 20 billion, to put this in perspective.


• They're 234 million transitors on the little chip, pictured above between the push pins.


• The processors are coming off the assembly line for testing. In other words, they're real.

NVIDIA is developing the graphic chip for the new PS3, and we can only hope that it is being built as aggressively as the CPU.

Amazing stuff. Read about it here on IGN. Read a more boring version (yet more detailed) of the same story here on ABC News.

-aB

iPods Don't Have Favorites. Promise. Steve Said So.

I have always felt that the "random" feature on iPods isn't really random. Sometimes, it just picks really good orders for songs in my playlist. I know this is just crazy talk, but many others have felt the same way.

Some think that their iPods have a thing for Steely Dan. Or maybe Alica Keys. For mine, it was James Taylor, Ian Van Dahl and U2 (especialy after the iPod/U2 commercials started - think about that conspiracy for a second).

But after many moons of research and now a statement from Stevie Jobs in Newsweek, it looks as though the algorithms that Apple developed are truly random. No affinity for certain songs, artists or BPMs (Beat Per Minute).

Engadget's statement is that "People love their iPods so much that they look for patterns in the pseudo-randomness. It’s what we do, as humans." Guess that makes sense.

Or does it?

Read the story here via Engadget.

-aB