a-cubed.info

After visiting Japan in 2007 for the Worldcon (Nippon 2007) Charlie Stross wrote in his travelblog that Japan had “got our future, damn it!”. I’ve just moved into a new-build apartment in Tokyo and thought I’d share some initial impressions of up to date living conditions in Tokyo, some of which clearly represent Charlie’s impression, but some of which are not ideal or futuristic. (more…)

The Today programme (BBC Radio 4′s morning news/current affairs programme for the non-Brit amongst you) has a “Best of Today” podcast available on the BBC site. While I regularly lsiten to the whole programme for a lot of the other news/current affairs programmes from Radio 4, the Today programme being 3 hours long has quite a bit of repetition (most people listen to it for up to an hour rather than the whole thing). Anyway, I had a look to see if the “Best of” was better than picking up the iPlayer version and forwarding to 08:00 today and found that they’d obviously had use of the TARDIS while no one at BBC Wales was looking. The date as I write this is Monday 6th April. Look at the podcast page, then see the close-up. (more…)

Toshiba announced today that it will pull out of producing the HD-DVD format, which leaves the way pretty much clear for Sony’s Blu-Ray to become the standard high definition physical distribution medium. This is a much quicker solution than the earlier format war (VHS v Betamax).

Some claim that physical distribution is now dead, citing declining CD sales (particularly among the young). However, even peer to peer systems struggle to compete with the simplicity and reliability of DVDs for most. So far, at least, easy playback of downloaded TV/movie content on HD home display screens mean that Blu-Ray will probably be quite successful. Only when both bandwidth and ease of display catch up to distributing the 1Gb needed for your average TV episode in HD format, and then showing it in good quality on your home LCD or plasma TV, will physical shipping of TV and Movies become truly obsolete. Video on demand has been “coming but not yet here” for so long now I’m not holding my breath for DVDs following CDs in decline any time soon.

BBC Radio has been having “severe technical difficulties” with their radio streaming over the internet for a couple of weeks now. This has been very disappointing because I’m used to listening to quite a few shows in the course of the week. I often listen to Today in Parliament (now off-air for the summer recess anyway) and the midnight news in the morning – the time difference means they’re fairly fresh when I get up. I also always listened to the News Quiz or the Now Show on Saturday, often following that with Any Questions.

But for the last two weeks, I’ve had to hunt around for stuff. The Now Show I’ve missed for two weeks; Thinking Allowed I missed one of, and many days I couldn’t get the Midnight News and had to go for the World Tonight or even PM.

It’s slowly getting a bit better, but there’s no way to catch up on what I’ve missed such as the Now Show. Sigh.

The internet connection at the Guest House has been a bit flaky since I got here. It seems to have four states:

1. Working
2. Occasionally failures to resolve DNS queries or connect, defeated by reloading in a web browser and ignorable for most other net work. Oddly, once a connection is created it generally continues to run if it’s a dynamic keep-alive connection. Multiple connections sometimes lead to missing graphics or, worse, non-loading of CSS files for web pages.
3. Mostly down. If I try hard I can sometimes get a web page to load by trying 20 or so “reloads”. Mail comes in when an IMAP connection establishes for a little while. Outgoing mail is very awkward and often doesn’t get out for hours or until it comes back up.
4. Completely down.

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While writing the post on the Butler cafe, I wanted to say something like “oodles of useless google search results”. This obviously leads to the new term:

Goodles: a large number of hits on a Google search, where the term you are searching for, if present anywhere, has been overridden by one of the following:

1. a semantic difference: e.g. searching for Bob Baker and finding bread and confectionery makers called Bob;
2. mis-spellings of a different word overwhelming it: e.g. searching for “femininist” brings up goodles of hits for “feminist” spelled wrong;
3. googlewashing;
4. googlebombing.

When the phrase “The Semantic Web” was coined, it was hailed by some as a resplendent vision, by others as an unachievable goal and by others as a new bubble. The point is that the current Web is indexed almost entirely syntactically. So, there is no simple way to differentiate between people who make bread (Baker) and the titular descendants of someone who might have baked bread hundreds of years ago (Baker) in a purely syntactic fashion.

Even within database-oriented proprietary systems, the injudicious digitisation or storage of digital information can lead to significant difficulties. While doing the research for my LLM thesis on copyright, I found that it was quite difficult to search the standard legal databases for “copyright”, since almost all written material included a copyright notice which triggered the search mechanism. I’m now finding a similar problem when trying to find papers on Google Scholar, and proprietary academic databases, regarding privacy. Many of the database engines include privacy policy links on their pages and the Google Scholar indexing system cannot distinguish between headers and links to privacy policies and papers about privacy issues.

As those who know me even moderately are aware, I’m still wedded to my Psion 5 PDA. Yes, it’s old technology, but it does what I need. The main reason I’m still using it, though, is the lack of a decent clamshell keyboard replacement device. Every so often, someone promises something that looks like it might be a replacement I’d use, but mostly they’re vapourware. Today’s Register shows a device at the CES in Las Vegas that looks like what I’ve been waiting for, though. I’m still not entirely sure about the looks of that keyboard, but the fold-out-and-out case design looks like it might be OK. It’s only just a bit bigger than a Psion.
Since I’m in the land of the technophile, I’ll have to go and see what they’ve got down at Shinjuku and Akihabara. I’ve already got a loyalty card with Yodobashi Camera from buying my camera there.