An old classic on this rainy day.

btw happy April 1st.

And nobody’s happy. Humour on Conan O’Brien

Ok I’m back – but instead of a hard hitting treatise on enterprise systems, structurational models or cloud computing, today I’d like to talk about vacuum cleaners. You see there was a big sale on iRobot Roombas at London Drugs this week and I snapped up the last one in town – apparently. For the uninitiated, Roombas are the robotic vacuum/sweeper that rolls around like a special-needs pet, bumping into walls and sweeping things up along the way. The Roomba’s have a certain charm – my daughter quickly nicknamed it the “Lil Dude.”

Roomba’s have been around for years, purchased by early adopter geeks and gadget freaks to handle household chores. You can now buy Roomba’s to scrub your floors, clean your pool, gutters and mow your lawn.

But all this pretense of buying robots to do housework mask the real fun thing about roombas – taking them apart and getting them to do other things. Now that the price of the device has fallen, the fun can begin and the “hacks or mods” can get started. Roombas come with a bluetooth port so you can get them doing all sorts of silly things via remote control, via your web browser or mobile phone.

Like it or not, here come the robots… My son is busy planning to build Roomba “battlebots” and other mods on devices, just like he does with his Nerf guns. For those not wanting to roll up their sleeves, you can soon break down and buy a Rovio, the distance babysitter.

Now Lil Dude  – get me a beer.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

“Everything is just a few hundred clicks away”

When I’m in need of someone to talk to, I now turn to Elbot, that Artificial Intelligence (AI) routine with the cute but annoying robot that did so well on the Turing Test in a recent Turing Test Showdown.

For the uninitiated, the Turing Test was created in 1950 by British Mathematician Alan Turing who said that if a machine was indistinguishable from a human it (the machine) was thinking. Passing the Turing test is probably going to be a requirement for all those new robots on their way after the current economic depression.

I’m not sure if I’d pass the Turing Test. But that’s another matter.

I only have three problems with Elbot,

1. When I tell him (it?) my problems, he always seems to want to turn the conversation back on himself (seems human)

2. He’s not that funny.

3. I wish his name was Tallulah. Elbot sounds so, so, robotic.

Good Evening,

1. If you are currently using Internet Explore 7.0, please don’t. A critical vulnerability exists that could infect your computer, launch malicious code remotely from your machine, steal your passwords and bring all sorts of other nasties upon you. At this time we aren’t sure if anti-virus software will catch the vulnerability. I suggest you run ”Mozilla Firefox” or some other browser until there is a rock-solid patch for Internet Explorer 7.0 – expected some time in January 2009. For TRU users, Firefox should already be installed on your desktop computer. The IT Service Desk will provide you any help you need. Update – Microsoft has now released a patch for this. Run Windows Updates – Security.
   
2. You may have noticed that the Toronto Stock Exchange has been down all day due to a “computer problem.” You may also recall that the London Stock Exchange was down all day in September.  Two things come to mind here, a) It would totally suck to be the IT Manager at those outfits and b) in our rush to cloudify everything, we may want to take extra care of those systems that can kill our fragile economies;
3. Green idea of the day – run the data centre hotter. While we currently keep the A/C on full tilt in our data centre, telecom companies are starting to run theirs at 35 degrees C. Given the bone chilling weather of late, I wouldn’t mind being in a nice warm server farm about now. Sorry, no fancy drinks allowed;
4. In other, non-IT related news, Canada was voted the friendliest place on Earth in an HSBC expat survey. The link is to a rather odd article (i.e. not as “in-depth” as advertised)  but nevertheless isn’t it great to be finally recognized as being so friendly, eh?
5. Sadly, your correspondent has been laid low with a bad flu. If he was smart he would have seen this sickness coming on Google’s Flu Trend Tracker and stayed inside, avoiding all contact.

Gentle Reader;

Today I was going  to write a clever entry about iPods. Everyone has one and some people I know change them once a year, like shoes. That’s all part of the Apple marketing campaign, captured exquisitely in this classic by the MadTV people.

But does the music coming out of all those iPods sound any good? I’m not convinced. Are we just trading off sound quality for storage quantity and dare I say, fashion?  Are we getting further and further away from how the music originally sounded? Will anything ever sound good again??? Inquiring minds want to know.

Answering these questions requires research and that’s when things got far too complicated for me. I needed to learn a lot more about Nyquist sampling algorithms, lossy compression techniques, codecs and rate-distortion theory. This science would inform the ideal bit rates for sound reproduction and playback. And I still wouldn’t have addressed the psycho-acoustical properties that need to be considered when you try and trick the human ear. And what about the quality of the headphones you use? (I bought myself some of those fancy noise canceling ones for Christmas – I’ll report back in the new year if that helped.)

So at this time it seems I can’t really comment on iPod sound quality. But I do have a theory. My theory is that your mood is directly related to your perception of sound quality. For example, music always seems to sound better at my brother’s house. Maybe it’s his dedicated listening room with the comfy chairs and a stereo that costs about as much as my car. Maybe it’s that rich, warm sound coming out of those speakers or maybe just the down-home hospitality and snacks.

I haven’t a clue. Happy Friday.

My favourite social network has to be linkedin.com. Besides from being a really good addressbook for business contacts, there is something comforting about  keeping in touch with people you spent time with in the corporate trenches over the years.

Sadly, I don’t have that much luck with facebook. I’m sure younger people dig it but I can’t stand the cliqueness and opportunities for social drama guaranteed by design.  (Me being voted worst dinner companion of my  fb “friends” doesn’t help either. )

That said, I must say I like the micro-blogging aspects of fb – this feature was borrowed directly from twitter.com I think. I like the more esoteric messages:

Pete is thinking about what cereal to have for breakfast.

Sally is on fire. No literally. Call 911!

Linkedin actually has a practical use for me in my life. I’m finding some of the groups very helpful to my job. With 30 million business users, who knows, it could be the place to be for networking and career opportunities.

Now can I please add you as a linkedin friend? We can do lunch…

I’ve noticed that reading traditional print media like newspapers and magazines sends me to the computer more often than I’d expect. Case in point: today’s Vancouver Sun had “wordled” the week’s reader’s comments into a “word cloud.” No surprise that biggest words this week were “market” and “storm.”

Of course I had to wordle my blog and some others as well.  Glad to see my technology blogs’ number one wordle is “new.” This is a fun tool to create meme maps. Besides from trend-spotting, I find that there is something interesting in looking at the non-linear relationships between related words. Subliminal messages appear like “better like shudder interfaces.” Try it on your favourite blog to find out what they are really saying…