Movies I watched today

Movies I watched today: Outland (featuring Sean Connery) - bit of 1980's scifi wonderland- computers with green type and vector graphics combined with shotgun toting on a moon base (on one of Jupiter's moons no less) and a healthy dose of video-phoning.

It all made me think about the durability of sci-fi ideas- why does video calling remain such a common element within sci-fi when it's available now, cheaply (I can buy a £40 phone on pay-as-you-go with video calling now) and no-one shows no interest in it? People (who know better than I do) argue that it's because video phoning is a visually-rich movie toy which makes it good for directors and story tellers. Others argue the other half of the story by saying that in reality it's not convenient to video call- you can't do it on the move and it's not really benefical to show everyone where you are or even who you are.

I'd agree with both arguments- but I'd like to turn them on their head a little bit. Visually rich may be frustrating now- but in the future it could be a security perk. VOIP and IM has opened us up to a whole new level of spoofing and identity fraud- whereas video-calling has brought us a whole new way of verifying the identity of the caller.

It's still next to impossible to generate on-the-fly life like speaking avatars that could fool a human being in conversation so video could easily secure your identity when making a call- if you don't recognise the caller, you can simply ignore them.

Which makes me wonder- why don't we use pictures more in cryphtography and more in general with communication software. Imagine an IM app where you buddy list had to have pictures of the person (and not just a picture or motto) and showed them in a room together for multi chat- it's simple enough to do. Why don't we use a digital photography as hash for all our passwords (as long as we don't share that specific photograph too much!)?

My final year disertation looked at picture sequences being used for passwords, rather than key sequences users would pick "hot-spots" or sequences of pictures from a grid rather than type in input- and it proved be a significantly better way of working- there's a good deal of studies looking at similar stuff (including Microsoft stuff if I remember rightly) so I'm amazed no one's gone commerical with a full product yet - maybe if I'm wrong someone can tell me who does it in reality?

As for the movie- a great bit of sci-fi fluff - nothing too substainal, but far from awful.

Geology Field Trip/the importance of good input...

Natalie "made me" go out on her Geology society's field trip- wasn't sure what to expect of it to be fair, but I did get a good chance to play around with my Panasonic Lumix FZ-20 - and it's a cracking camera. Oh, and I found a shark's tooth- how cool is that?!

Back to my point (for today) - don't ever let anyone tell you that "a camera is a camera".

I guess having working in a camera shop way back (three years ago) when the digital era was peaking (as opposed to the steep decline it's in now as the snapshotters who originally drove people to digital compacts in the first place because they offered ultra-convenience (and brought back fun) to the art of photography are moving quickly onto mobile phones which provide the same power but with even more convenience) I suffer the photographer nerd's addiction to "pixel's aren't everything" and the "lens is king".

Having been out of the field for a bit though I thought going back to doing some "proper" photography would make me envious- I had a two-year-old digital camera from Panasonic (who were relatively new in the digital camera field back then) and everyone else was toting digital SLR's (Canon EOS's no less) and 12 megapixel compacts- making my mere five-million pixels sound positively low-res!

But the Panasonic still rocked - every shot it took (on automatic, with no fiddling or post tweaking) looked great to me - and whilst my camera was pretty bulky for a non-professional, non-SLR camera, I felt chuffed with the results.

The reason for it? Well, the image stabiliser makes every shot sharp and that helps a lot- most bad shots are those that are ruined by blur - typically the photographer's mistake (and don't let them tell you otherwise!) rather than the subjects- but the image stabiliser worked a treat- I can see why more and more manufacturers are picking this feature up and making it the norm.

But if I had to say what I think the real, main, reason that the shots looked great I'd have to say it was the lens. Sharp, bright, clear photos require light - lots of light- and that's what this one delivered. Decent wide angle, cracking zoom, these are the things that we can all easily assess with statistics and the things we spot straight away when we're looking at the reviews and tech-sheets- but what you really need are sample shots that show you the lens quality in the light and in the dark.

I'll post my pictures on the web in a wee bit - though I doubt many of you will be able to pick up the camera since it's long been discontinued (though I hear it's replacement is just as good). What I do hope though is that it'll encourage all to think not just about the pixels, but about the lens- I love technology's drive sometimes (in fact it drives me most of the time), but let's not forget that input is the real story- everything depends on the quality of input- be it software or hardware and that all boils down to the technology's interface with the world.

We've seen it in the I-phone- it captures input in a way people are enthralled by - touch- and gives highly rewarding output based on simple input. The bad "output" going around about FaceBook is based upon people's dislike of the high amount of "unconcious" input - the meta-data we unknowningly generate whilst browsing pictures of our friends and zombie-tagging each other - giving output in the form of advertising.

Good software, in my opinion, captures as much as it can that can be considered relevant and then a little bit more. But it also feeds back on that input with output that is measured and well processed. Some input is useless, can be thrown away, some can be used in really clever ways in the background to make the software better, but the really important stuff must be high quality- just like the lens on my camera. So make your input capture as good as you can - your program is only as good as the user's input.

Document Recovery - Recuva

Everyone's deleted something in error and cursed themselves - but most of see that data as being gone for good. Recuva (by the same people behind the excellent CCLeaner, and a rare-British small software house!) wins my award for being a life saving bit of freeware.

A simple, tiny download. Quick installation with no questions asked. Simply interface, quick scanning ability and a high recovery rate. It's simple and it works - I don't think there's much more I need or could say about a piece of freeware that you'll rarely use but the time you do use it you wish you could kiss it's creator!

My only complaint is I cant see a portable version currently - running it straight from a USB key would be excellent - but hey, if that's all I can fault it for, that's going pretty well!

Whilst I'm on the topic of deleting data- why hasn't Windows get any better at this yet? The Recycle Bin (as ever, stolen from the Mac world) was a great feature (once people remembered that stuff was put in there by default and disk space was no longer an issue- I remember in 1996 with Windows 95 everyone cursed the recylce bin for a time because people thought deleted items should just go straight away because it left people scratching their heads as to where all their disk-space was going) but seemingly after that we've had nothing.

No, I tell a lie, Vista gives us version control and recovery of document files. That's a good feature- shame it ain't obvious to normal users and isn't integrated into (at least Microsoft's) apps- e.g. you can roll back the document without dropping out of the program itself and digging it out through Explorer.

It seems like the future may be the world of Time Machine that Apple's introduced (again, leading the pack)- but we need it for Windows.

Some simplification/streamlining of the delete process would be great too- shift-delete and delete make sense to me - but I imagine it has caught a few people out- perhaps everything should go into the recycle bin first- but perhaps have stuff tagged for over-writing (e.g. it won't take up disk space but can be restored up and until the time that it's overwritten). How about making network deletition (and cut and paste actions) not result in data loss - how may times have you deleted something on a network share in error- then remember that it rather than going to your recycle bin or even the network resource's recycle bin, it's simply moved into the wonderful world of file oblivion?

And finally, since I've clearly got rage on the whole issue I might as well cover the final bit of the problem- where's the decent backup software? The simple stuff, that works on servers (because there simply isn't a good MS Exchange / DFS backup solution on the market) and is seamless to use for everyone. The stuff that is switched on by default (just like the security experts say the firewall should be, the usability experts should be saying the same thing), the stuff that means we can roll back software and changes without it breaking everything else...

Part of my rage on the issue is this- today I successfully installed recuva and pull back 20 gigs of data which, after being deleted from a network share, looked to be lost. It was easy. When I was asked the day before to recover something from a backup (woho- something which had been deleted was actually being backed up) made by a leading manufacturer's backup product (Symantec (cough) Backup Exec (cough)) it failed- and after doing a bit of reading it's a known issue- which means a serious change to the backup configuration to prevent it from happening again and a serious amount of effort (and, thus far, wasted time) trying to recover a single document (less than 5 meg!). Where's the balance, the innovation in the market? Apple, once more, seems to be leading the pack in making things which just work- why can't Microsoft/Windows developers be there when it counts?!

On the subject of... new projects...

I think I can safely reveal to all a couple of projects I'm working on just now, cause if somebody stole the ideas I'll be honest and say I couldn't care less....

• \My First Facebook Application- Jarv AI Predictor. I was all set to release this last weekend, but it went horribly wrong when my ASP script went all terminal looping on me when subjected to a new login... not a good start. Still, the idea is sound enough, my nice little back end application analyses your friends for patterns and attempts to do so crazy predictions use a combination of genetic algorithms and pattern recognition- basically it's the same back end as I've been using since Uni (good to know I got something good out of my degree!).
  What does it mean in terms of a facebook application- well, in keeping with the theme of all facebook apps, it's quite pointless, but you can basically run it against your friends and it will scope out the likelyhood of one of your friends liking your other friends (either romantically or just friendly) calculates the likelyhood of your friend liking one thing or another. It's been done before, but not, as far as I'm aware, with the computation in the background, and thus far, it's uncanny if slightly pointless. Hm.

• \My Alternative Support Desk - I've been working (on the sly) on a mini version of support desk for my own private use. I saw a couple of problems with the existing version which I could, in my mind, easily fix.
  First off, is accurately recording time spent on a task- so I've added a simple timer which automatically starts recording when I start looking at a ticket and generates me a log file - it doesn't complete the ticket for me, it merely shows the time I started looking at an issue.
  
  Secondly, multiple tickets- I'm often having to fill in dummy entries in order to save my progress so far on a issue just so I can look at another ticket- so I'm now running multiple tickets.
  
  Thirdly- Ticket logging - I loved Paul's new interface for it's "tab-keyboarding-full visibility of data-ness" - everything a key press away, all the info on screen, but as I see it, it's all a bit too much info. So I did a bit of thinking, and decided that call logging should be a seperate process - so my front page is all about the logging, and my second page is about filling in the tickets...
  
  But the special pixy dust comes in on the third page- the knowledge centre page- this pulls down information from various resources to give you the best information available - previous tickets using a smart filter to get relevant data out, shortcuts to network resources from the Service Desk\Remote Admin folderset, passwords from the encrptyed database (without compromising security- the database must be authenticated to first before you can view the data!), network diagrams and health check documents, VPN method, assets (which are starting to make a comeback, thanks Smithy!), dial up configs, etc.
  
  Because I'm afraid of Paul (he is a big guy) I've actually be creating a transactional database using a ridicous bit of screen-scrapping using auto-hot-key-it to tear data out of his database into my own and then pushing data out via the Support Desk app itself- tacky, I know, but I'm not up for asking for the source code to the app, and I'm not up for breaking a "live" system!
  
  I'm actually thinking I might dump the VB tester I'm currently working with and switch to HTML/ASP, but haven't quite commited yet...

There you go, a small sample of what I'm upto at the moment... more to come

On the subject of... why I'm blogging again....

Long time, no blog. Typical of me really, getting distracted by all the dull things that exist in the world, selfishly using all my time for internal self-inspection (aka navel-gazing) and doing work which doesn't really need to be done!
I wanted to blog again, because:

• My memory's getting worse and it won't do any harm to be quote by others about the things I've forgotten (probably)
• I'm back into the swing of working on projects outside of work- and I'm loving it.
• I'm back to questioning a lot of things in my life, and I find that's the time I'm most likely to blog, because voicing my opinion out loud in a completely unread forum can't do any harm, can it?

I'm back

Good news, I'm back. Many may question why, many more will hope it won't last. But since I've got a bit of time to waste, Ask Jarv is back. More soon...

On the subject of RAIDed RAM

I would just like to offer you my thoughts on RAIDed RAM- it should not happen, and most certainly not with green eggs or ham. I quote a master:

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port
And the bus is interrupted at a very last resort And the access of the memory makes your floppy disk abort
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.
If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash
And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash
And your data is corrupted cause the index doesn't hash
Then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash!

If the label on the cable on the table at your house
Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse
But your packets want to tunnel unto another protocol
That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss
So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse
Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang
'Cuz sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang!
When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy in the disk
And the macrocode instructions cause unnecessary risk
Then you'll have to flash the memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM.
Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your Mom!

- Anon. (this Anon bloke writes a lot of good stuff!)

Some of our favourite Ask Jarv questions so far...

Q: Why do the mountain gorillas of Hukananaheles have sharp, meat tearing teeth when they only eat plants?
A: It is in fact a lie that they only plants, secretly they eat small kittens, but only when people are looking the other way. They actually use the plants because of their teeth cleaning attributes- leaving them with minty fresh breath all day long.

Q: How do they get the cables up electricity pylon cables?
A: Out of hours circus stilt walkers are used to carry out the work during the early hours of the morning. It takes a cirus performer approximately (on average) ten minutes to carry the cable between two pylons. The longest distance between two electricity pylons ever was 822.3 miles, and was used to power Jarv's house when we bought a tropical island- two circus performers died installing the cable when they realised their stilts weren't higher than the water levels. Eventually the power cable was installed to allow Jarv to run his new electric pencil sharpner.

Q: When will the world's oil Reserves actually run out?
A: The world's oil reserves have actually already run, and there is a global conspiracy to cover it up. All cars actually run Pepsi cola with petroleum smell infused. Off-shore oil refinerys are actually massive robots that are mostly hidden beneath the sea, ready to be raised to enforce the peace should the truth ever be found out.

Q: How do they get ball bearings to be so round and sooo shiny?
A: Ball bearings are made by small third-world slaves who take a goats testicles and work them until they becomes small and shiny. In an interesting aside, contrary to popular believe, ball bearings are so called not because they are ball like, but because they are made from the "balls" of a goat of kid "bearing" age.

Q: How do they get all the toothpaste colours together in the container?
A: It's actually a special chemical process that occurs when you squeeze. The pressure applied to the container squeezes the particles creating minature blackholes and miniatures supernovas- obviously the two cancel each other out, but not before changing the fundamentals laws of physics resulting in the strange optical effect and the colourisation of the toothpaste. The interesting side effect of all this is that it leaves your breath fresh and your teeth more shiny than a star (and it's also good for removing stains off the carpet).

Q: How do they know more people die crossing the road than flying?
A:This is actually the result of the polls amongst the living dead. When asked, most of the living dead report "grrrzzhzhggggggghhhhhhzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz" (translated as "they remember seeing headlights coming towards them"), whereas very few rememeber looking at their feet whilst plummetting from a great height. Many have argued that these studies are unfair, as most of the living dead resulting from plane crashes tend to more upper class and better off and therefore less likely to be found answering such stupid surveys.

Q: Why did they change the colour of the disabled stickers from Orange to Blue?
A: Because of the National Colour Blind Act of 1987 which stated that it was Colour Blindness is a disability too, and immediately ordered every colour blind person to be sent a disabled sticker. Unforunately they ran out of Orange paper and so they were reissued in blue. Nobody, to be honest, cared.

Q: Why are Japanese people so short?
A: The sumo culture of Japan has meant that many people are born of short, fat, round people. Additionally, as there is so little land mass it has proved necessary to build many skyscrapers, and with lots of fat people on the top floors ceilings in Japan are gradually lowering, forcing people to evolve around the strutures they live in.

Thanks to the staff of BCDS for supplying the questions!

Why Ask Jarv'?

Many people are asking why I have created the web-o'-knowledge that is Ask Jarv. Well I'll tell you in a bulleted list (because I know how to do that and bulleted items need not be proper sentences, hence saving me typing):

• Many people in the past have turned to God. That is foolish, because they could easily turn to me.
• Chuck Norris has become a cult hero. Chuck Norris is the Jarv natural enemy.
• Even Ninja's need to study the way of Jarv.
• I feel I should share.
• Everyone doesn't know everything, except me.
• Google's time has come- Jarviiiiiiiiiiiiiiis is here!

So know you know.

Welcome to Ask Jarv

Welcome Ask Jarv, the source of all knowledge on the internet. The hope is that one day everyone will "Jarv" something rather than "Google" it, and Jarv'in will be the hippest thing that everyone in the know is doing.