Servusamanu.com

I’ve been tweaking the website all day. Right now I’m using Yslow to optimize the site.

I got a C grade overall.

Time to use gzip and add expires headers.

This article ‘Five Ways to Speed Up Page Response Times‘ has been very helpful.

Cheers!

I wrote an article about the Kindle way back when. There’s a new one coming out and it’s not really that much better.

Gizmodo has an article here.

Too slow, too small, too expensive.

$489? Make it $150 and I’ll start to look at it. It should at least be competitive with an ipod, which can hold significantly more (and play musics, music etc etc. Why can’t the kindle combine all of these features?)

No panning, no zooming, no scrolling. Bah? The bigger screen is really nice and the textbook deals could make it great for students (maybe…a big maybe), but these half-hearted readers are just not enough to make way for a digital revolution in books.

As soon as they can halve the price, get it to at least 20 GBs of space, and add at least one non-reader functionality (music, video, file storage, wireless, email, web browser, etc etc), it’s just not enough.

IMHO as always.

Here’s a video.

Today I’ve got nothing but a throwaway article of sorts. It’s a tech article I stashed away about a month ago about iPhone penetration in Japan, namely that they hate it. It’s an interesting bit of culture that a device considered fairly chic in America, is a lame duck once you cross the Pacific.

Aside from hobby writing, I do some freelance web design. I recently made a page with Creekside Systems for MastrolePassing.com. Mastrole Passing provides football training camps for quarterbacks and receivers based out of Florida. Take a look!

Writers have used a number of technologies to create their works. Carving, handwriting, typing. Speech recognition is probably the next one…maybe.

Carving/Sculpture: a few thousand years.
Handwriting: a few thousand years.
Typing: 100 years+
Speaking: Not yet…

Rant

I spent the last few days working with a web template for a freelance web job. I might as well have not bothered.

There is nothing quite as frustrating as using a template, the intention being to make life easier, and spending twice as much time flogging it to death trying to get it to work than I would have if I had just coded from scratch to start with. The web designer purists out there are probably chuckling to themselves considering this a lesson learned: code it yourself, code it yourself!. To that I say phooey!

Instead, the lesson here is I need to run my templates through an extensive interview process. Dig a little into their background and life experience. Did they have a rough childhood that’s going to leave me bewildered and confused as unpredictable problems arise? Do they suffer from a lack of formal education, which forces me to go back and comment another person’s code to figure out what’s going on. Or worst of all, is their resume a novel script, the template being nothing but some fancy images that look nice, but the functionality being vapor. The lesson is I might just need to join the world of template maker’s and make some that give you some direction on how to use them.

/Rant

Just a few days ago I wrote an article on the g-speak, a computer that responds to hand motions. It seemed like a bit of science fiction come alive.

Well, here’s some more. (No that top picture isn’t real…yet). Now that we have laser weapons we’re presumably well on our way to having phasers set to stun, warp drives, and alien bartenders.

Once lasers become prevalent, what will futuristic warriors use in their world conquering adventures? Heinlein’s combat suits aren’t quite there yet and robot armies always seem to be out for revenge. Singularity and the bridge between AI and sentience is going to be an on-going drama for sure, but surely there’s room for humanity (and thus war) for at least a few more centuries. There may, perhaps, be a non-or-semi-sentient-robot-warrior niche to be filled soon. Presumably missiles would still be the most logical form of combat in actual space, but oddly enough you don’t tend to see them as often in space combat novels. And what about terraforming? Last time I saw that was Star Trek…

A month ago Engadget reported on a bit of future-come-to-the-present technology called the g-speak. For anyone who saw Minority Report (or even more topical, the MI6 computers in Quantum of Solace) it probably looks rather familiar.

It’s a cool bit of technology outright and I can almost see myself walking along virtual aisles almost-literally placing things on my shopping cart. You figure 10 years ago in a world of dial-up modems and beige computer cases something like that would be unthinkable, and yet here it is maybe only years or at most decades from production.

And that’s only looking at the small bit of time. On a wider scaller technology is progressing at an unheard of rate. Moore’s law, abstracted to ‘technology’ as a whole, predicts that technology progresses exponentially, doubling roughly every 2 years. It seems pretty true to me.

The consequences of all this technology deferred to another article, I’d like to suggest a new law. The amount of cleverness it takes to write good futuristic science-fiction increases exponentially, doubling roughly every 2 years. Between the advances coming out every day in every field, it’s hardly any surprise that steam-punk decided to take the future into the past. It’s just getting harder and harder to keep that future more than a few years out. We sure do live in exciting times, eh?

I do not own a Kindle. I also don’t have an Iphone, Touch, Blackberry, Sony PRS-505, or any E-books on my Ipod. All in all I’ve completely neglected the electronic book market. Old stick-in-the-mud that I am, I’ve largely refrained even from books on tape. For me there is nothing better than the feel of paper as I curl up in a nice lounge chair or against a creatively arranged cushion of blankets.

During the height of the dotcom years the e-book market was predicted to be huge. This article from 2000 quotes an estimated market of 2.3 billion dollars in e-book sales by 2005. However, this article from last year estimates the market to be around 230 million this year…but within five years to get to between 3 and 5 billion.

While it’s true that e-book sales are slowly going up (and the number of books available digitally has increased significantly), it seems to be a running trend to predict billion dollar revenues and see far more modest returns in reality.

This could be somewhat discouraging, but I think that is a niche to be exploited. Text messaging, instant messages, blogs, the iphone/ipod/touch proof that people are comfortable using small portable devices to read and receive entertainment. The failure of this market has been a combination of a market that has not exactly fostered adventurous purchasing. (Especially not right now. The dotcom boom seems a hundred years ago). Also, only now are e-books really available easily. Amazon’s push with the Kindle is definitely a step in the right direction.

Sadly, in my mind, three things really stand in the way. First, these devices are too specialized. The kindle is an e-book reader and not much else. No one really wants to carry around an extra device and if they’re going to, it needs to do more than just e-books. The phone, music player, radio, video player, test messenger, camera, web browser, email is on the way. If it has e-book capability as well, it’ll get used.

Second, these solo devices are too expensive. If they are going to be e-book readers they need be priced realistically. When faced with buying an ipod or a touch or a Blackberry vs. an ebook reader for the same price, the multi-use (and flashier) tool is going to win every time. Considering that buying books will likely outstrip the cost of most data/phone plans, the Kindle turns into a money pit.

Those are both technological concerns. For writers though, there is one thing they have control over. The works themselves. The few people I know who do a lot of reading on portable devices enjoy reading newspapers and blogs. They prefer short works that they can finish in 15 minutes. Right, wrong, or otherwise the market is changing. Micro-fiction and episodic fiction, like the old serial novels, have an exciting future in the world of electronic books. In a way it’s sad that the epic novel is such a niche pleasure, but there’s a great deal of creative potential in shorter, digital fiction that I, personally, look forward to exploring.