A Nautical Miscellany

Coming round again..

 Received this message this morning from a friend who uses Hotmail for his mail service, been awhile but it would appear that someone is STILL trapped in a hotel in Lagos. I was actually pretty impressed with the writing of the message, generic enough to be sent to anyone but with just a soupcon of desperation.

His account has been  hacked, I suggested Gmail instead.
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Hello, Sorry I didn't inform you about my traveling to West Africa for a Seminar, am presently in Lagos Nigeria. I am stranded here because i misplaced my wallet and other valuable things, personal items such as cash, credit cards and identification documents on my way to the hotel i lodged.  I will like you to assist me urgently with the sum of 2500 pounds to sort-out my hotel bills and get myself back home. I will appreciate whatever you can afford; I’ll pay you back as soon as I return. I had no option than to send you an e-mail since I have exceeded my spending limit in the hotel and I have no money to call you. It will cost me much to make/receive phone calls and I don't have such money right now. I can only contact you through my e-mail for now. It's impossible for me to access my bank account from here, which is why I need your help. The safest and fastest way for you to help me out is by sending the money through the Western Union .  So I will really appreciate whatever you can afford and I promise to pay you back as soon as I return, kindly let me know if you can be of help? So that I can send you the Details which you will use when sending the money to me through Western Union ,  Thanks.

A game changer or a footnote?

 I came across an article in the Sydney Morning Herald today about the tiny Google office in that fair city. It is run by two brothers who sold their business to Google some years ago. The business was called Where 2 Tech which no one had heard of, it became Google Maps, which everyone has heard of. In any event they've moved on since then to a new application/service called Wave which they revealed at a Google developers conference in San Francisco yesterday.

The gist of Wave is that e-mail, IM, photos, videos and blogging will all be integrated in a collaborative way. Conversations called "Waves" (of course) will exist in a browser which makes it system indifferent, including mobile devices such as iPhone and Android. Google defines a Wave:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

The description from their blog is here in Went Walkabout, Brought back Google Wave, there is an embedded video from the conference which gives a detailed demo. The demo is bit long and geeky but the technology is fascinating. I was particularly impressed with the idea that you could watch while someone was typing a message to you, not afterwards but as they actually typed it.

The question in mind is whether this will become the next big thing and everyone will be lined up around the virtual block to get signed on (as they were to a great extent with Gmail) or whether it is a bit too geeky to be adopted by the main stream. 

One very smart thing they are doing is making the source code open to other developers right from the git go to enable them to build on and extend the technology. Another question in my mind and which I didn't hear addressed in the demo is how it will integrate with existing e-mail systems. If you have one system for dealing with friends/coworkers on Wave and another on regular e-mail how long will you  keep it up before you dump the one with fewer correspondents? Nevertheless it's a fascinating idea, stay tuned...

Postscript: I managed to leave out one of the most interesting features, and something that the developers left to the very end of the demo. Wave can translate on the fly, and I mean literally as each word is typed to and from 40 different languages. Not too shabby.

Remanence:Variance

This has absolutely nothing to do with things shipping or marine but is fascinating nonetheless. What I like the most is that it takes an old technique, time lapse photography, and turns into something that is technically elegant and beautiful at the same time. It's a year in the life of Tokyo, shot with a relatively low cost DSLR, a Canon Rebel.

This will take awhile to load as it's a big file, best to press the play and then pause while you grab a coffee and wait for most of the file to load before you watch. If you press the HD button on the right side of the screen and then the HD symbol that appears on the screen it will take you to the Vimeo web site where you can watch in very sharp HD.

I'll quote from the authors site:

"Shot over the span of a year with Canon DSLRs (mostly 350d), processed with Lightroom (raw files color adjustment and resizing)/VirtualDub (deshaker/deflicker filters)/Sony Vegas (editing). Original rendered in 1080p.

Music is "Is That What Everybody Wants" from Cliff Martinez's superb soundtrack for Solaris, available from all major music outlets."

By the way, the definition of remanence is: The imprint of energy that remains long after an object has been moved

remanence : variance from Samuel Cockedey on Vimeo.

Warning! Geek Alert!

Interesting, I read an article that said that if you used your Macbook in one place usually that you should hook it up by ethernet rather than just using wireless, as it always will be faster. I did that and got a modest speed boost, when I checked the cable I found it was Cat 5, not 5e which I thought was the current standard network cable. I went to order a 5e from this site I found (Monoprice.com) and noticed that now there is a Cat 6! The cable cost me all of about $5 plus shipping. I was getting 13mbs/s on the old Cat 5, when I switched to the Cat 6 ...

Here's with Cat 5:

 

Here's a minute later with Cat 6:

Since then I've hit over 30mb's occasionally as well. Water goes faster through a pipe than a straw so makes sense the connection is faster.

Incidentally, speedtest.net is the best site I've come across for testing your internet connection speed, at least for those thus inclined.

What was that sound??

It was pigs flying overhead so fast they went back in time to the ice age when the snowballs had a chance in hell.

I made a post earlier in the year, Credit Where Credit Is Due (ok, it's only 3 entries before this one but it was back in February). It's not evident unless you watch the video but the subject was a new technology for displaying photos, I'm not talking about just a couple of snaps on a website  but thousands of pictures comprising terabytes of data. It's very impressive as demonstrated in the video. The sad part of course was that this company had been purchased by Microsoft, I think the fellows quote was, "I never thought I'd be working for Microsoft".

Flash forward a few months and they are now prepared to release the first application using this technology called Seadragon. The first application is unsurprisingly, a photo viewer, not for a desktop or laptop but rather for a handheld computer. The irony is that the application couldn't be released for Windows CE, the operating system for handhelds that Microsoft developed, but rather for the iPhone. Unfortunately as the MicroSoft rep said," Most phones out today don’t have accelerated graphics in them The iPhone does and so it enabled us to do something that has been previously difficult to do. I couldn’t just pick up a Blackberry or a Nokia off the shelf and build Seadragon for it without GPU support.'

Damn, I hate it when that happens.

The link to the story is here for those wearing beanies and propellers:

Live_Labs_releases_Seadragon_Mobile

Credit where credit is due.

Have a look at this, once you get into the video and realise how incredibly huge the amount of data being presented you realise why they call this "jaw dropping". And I'm showing it even if it is MicroSoft! (though the fellow does say "I never thought I'd find myself working for MicroSoft")

Lists and the inner uber geek

I am a lists kind of guy, I have always been a lists kind of guy. I'm sure that I will forget something and usually do. The only way to assure myself of covering the ground for my particular monomania is to jot down a good list. I'm not sure when this started though I remember early on at sea that someone advised me to always carry a notebook in my pocket and I perhaps picked up the habit then. By the time I was mate it was a fixture in my coverall pocket.

At one point (and this was before planned maintenance systems in general and certainly before they were applied to the deck department) I would cover the perspex cover of the GA drawing in the cargo office with a long list of all the maintenance for deck machinery for the next month. The advantage here was that if I wasn't around, (on the bridge, down a tank or god help me, asleep) the bosun could always stop in the cargo office and see quickly where next to direct the crowd.  Even being the long time geek that I have been the advantage of an analog system that everyone could see, that never went down and was only booted once was apparent.

I'm still split digital/analog, when I go out I like to grab an old envelope and use the back for a list of the things I'm going to pick up. For work I could never find an elegant way in a notebook to move undone tasks along from one page to another. I tried using Daytimers for a few years and Filofax but there seemed to be a lot of moving of pages and whatever design you bought the layout didn't work. Eventually I just ended up with a plain notebook and used sticky notes to move tasks along from page to page.

Nowadays, and for a few years now I've tracked all that I haven't accomplished on my computer. Originally on whatever work peecee I had but lately of course on my blessed Macs.  I tried Yojimbo and Circus Ponies Notebook (with a name like that how could you not try it?) which were both good programs but went a bit too far the other way in lacking enough of a PM structure (having used MicroSoft Project, the poor cousin of  their other barely adequate software programs).

I have for a few weeks been trying out a new program from Omni Group called OmniFocus. OmniFocus bills itself as "Professional-grade personal task management" and damned if there isn't some truth in advertising for once.  Omni produces several other programs that are common on Mac's, Omni Outliner and Omni Graffle being an outlining program and a drawing program respectively and knowing those programs made taking this one up very easy.  There's likely lots of reviews online if anyone is interested in the program but suffice to say for me that I found it very easy to learn and fast to get all the tasks I could think of into the program. The developers are devotees of the GTD or Getting Things Done principles of David Allen and that is apparent in the design. I'm only scratching the surface but one of the features that appealed to my inner geek is the ability to e-mail yourself tasks and using a simple code have them automatically entered into the program. 

If I send myself an e-mail that has as the subject

-- complete passport application >Travel @Online #tomorrow

It appears in OmniFocus as this:

The program grabs the message from Mail via a rule that it has inserted in the setup, it picks up the project from the ">", the action that needs to be performed by the "@" and the due date from the "#"

OK, I did say it was geeky, but something that is this elegant and well thought out deserves a look.