Servusamanu.com

I’m currently working as a network admin.

For the nerds out there:

8 FreeBSD Servers
1 Debian Server
1 Centos Server (1 more on the way)
2 Windows Server 2000 Boxes
1 Windows Server 2003 Box
1 Solaris Box

Email: PostFix
Monitoring: Nagios 3.0.6 among other things
Backups: RShapShot
WebServer: Apache 5

I’m working on moving things to Centos and virtualizing the network. I also want to get the email moved over to Zimbra. Users: 30 local users, 50 ‘offices’ with up to 10 users each. W00t w00t!

A: an oddly capitalized name
B: an obscure military acronym
C: a mnemonic device for remember how to parallel park
D: a website with presentations by experts in the field.

Happens to be D. Big surprise, hardy har har.

I’ve been watching Technology Education Design presentations for a few months now (and somehow missed it before that) and they’re pretty great. The science and technology presentations in particular happen to be interesting and awe-inspiring. From scientists preparing for space voyages to medical professionals talking about disease vectors to electronic artists showing off their crazy creations, there’s plenty of stuff on there.

Here’s the About.

Here’s the interesting stuff.

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.

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?