Kings of an Older Generation

Paul Brickhill, original Australian author of The Dam Busters may be turning in his grave. The master of fakery is now in charge of re-kindling the memories of the bravest men who never had the chance to pass on their bravery to younger generations.

The director of the longest movies I am thankful I’ve never seen: Lord of the Rings; Peter Jackson, is now remaking the classic 1950s British movie of the book of the famous raid on the dams of the Ruhr valley in 1943.

If he destroys this like he has decimated the love of his childhood, King Kong (1933) , almost as much as the 1976 version: I am going to be livid. This movie is not about ILM/Weta technical gee-whizzery. It is about the men who flew in World War II, and those who lost their lives on both sides for reasons the current young un’s have forgotten.

The Dam Busters movie/book is a salute to quirky English scientist (Barnes Wallis) and to the bravery of airmen of the Empire; in a time that the current generation has quickly forgotten. Richard Todd, himself a veteran, played Wing Commander Guy Gibson (Victoria Cross), who died in a de Havilland Mosquito in Holland, September 1944.

During the Dam Busters raid in May of 1943 Guy was in command, and merely 25 years old. I trust that an appropriate age (that is, young) actor is chosen to provide realism to what otherwise could go the way of King Kong.

We need to remember; and I hope the movie does for the airmen of the Empire what Saving Private Ryan has done for the veterans of D-Day. To remember, not be entertained.

GeoTravelling

A Flickr account, Firefox, this Greasemonkey script. Hinted at yesterday, in Javascript today! Once it is on the cloud, you can live in the clouds.

Now when browsing images, Flickr adds a visual navigation panel to the right. Finding pictures that are to the North, South, East, West (and intermediates)

My London pictures, being the most accurately geotagged, are now a part of a virtual walk-through.

Geotagging: Three Dimensions off our Virtual Future

Nick Hodge, Flickr.com, Geotagged: spent the greater part of today geotagging my images stored in Flickr. Geotagging is the addition of spacial or geographical metadata (that is: latitude and longitude) to my uploaded images. The four cameras I’ve used do not have GPS, so this geotagging caper is a manual post-processing effort.

The resolution of the Yahoo! Map Images for Sydney and London are excellent, the maps suck (unless you are in the US!). Even Tokyo’s map was strangely low resolution. At the time of writing, 600,000 images have a geotag according to Flickr. Microsoft’s Local Live and Google’s Google Maps are way better.

Why invest the time?

Somewhere, someday, someone is going to use this data to find out where someone was on a certain day. Or, some smart software is going to create an interesting view of our world.
Time has been a part of the EXIF camera data for many years. These two dimensions are excellent for locating on a simple 2D map, but do not give enough “resolution” to be for our Virtual Future. Apart from the height, the target, tilt and heading would provide more data: Imagine a Second Life in a fully imaged, geotagged, Microsoft PhotoSynth’d world. With the data out there in the cloud, we can live out our life in the virtualized clouds.
A most pleasant reason is to revisit your travels. Re-orienting yourself, remembering the streets of London without the 28+ hour flight. Fun. Reliving the past, virtually. The future will be more out there and immersive.

Gartner Agrees with nickhodge.com

Windows Vista the last of its kind: Windows will go virtual, Gartner agrees with my assessment that the future of Windows is componentised, virtualized and smaller.

Gartner expects a significant update to Vista in late 2008 or 2009 that will add virtualisation (in the form of a component called a hypervisor) and a service partition.

You read it here first, 4 days ago.

Virtually Emulating First Loves

In an effort to re-ignite my first love whilst on my leave of absence – I’ve been looking for a good TRS-80 emulator to rekindle the flames of technical desire. Also over the last 4 weeks I’ve also had a small “side project” watching the goings on in the desktop virtualization space, especially on the Mac. Parallels has been an excellent investment to get Windows XP running on the MacBook Pro; just waiting for the ACPI/Direct3D (or VMWare for the Mac) version so I can run a build of Windows Vista.

Admission #1: the first computer my dad purchased for me was a TRS-80 Model I. Not the prettiest, nor the most powerful of machines – 1.77Mhz with 16Mb Kilobytes (I even accidently put Mb!) of RAM. Welcome to 1981. That’s right, 1981. 25 years/ a quarter of a century ago.

The best emulator for the TRS-80 is written by Matthew Reed. Found thanks to
Ira Goldklang’s TRS-80 web site. So, I have TRS32 running inside Windows XP in Parallels on MacOS X. Shells within Shells.

Quest for the Key of Night Shade

Admission #2: the TRS-80 we owned stored data onto a cassette, not a floppy disk. Way-back when I was one of those computer-store kids. Thanks to the sales guys at Tandy Electronics/Radio Shack, we’d spend all day sitting on the computers typing in programs and occasionally demonstrating to prospective buyers. As floppy disks were expensive, we didn’t get access to storage – so TRSDOS was not an environment I was ever exposed to. Getting the emulator working involved remembering how to get BASIC working, and learning yet another OS.

Admission #3: I’ve watched zero minutes of Lord of the Rings. Even from DVD. Ever since the school librarian suggested I borrow The Hobbit, attempting to read a single page, and quickly returning the mush – I’ve actively avoided the fantasy genre. World of Warcraft drives me nuts. Sorry Neil and Mark!

Before this dispassion arose, I did get into one fantasy-style game on the TRS-80: “Quest for the Key of Nightshade”. It is strange how you remember names such as these for many years. Last week I found a version of the BASIC program, originally typed all the lines from a computer magazine into Basic and saved to cassette, on Ira’s website. From memory, this was written by a Canadian programmer and won “TRS-80 game of the year 1981” in some US magazine and was reprinted in 1982 by Australian Personal Computer.

The screen dump above is from this game. Ahh, the fond memories of our first loves.

Being the Forest, Forgetting the Trees

Microsoft is on the cusp of shipping a whole forest of new products. Vista, .Net 3.0, Office 2007 and *.live.com stuff than you can poke a branch/stick at. All of which presents Microsoft with some tall challenges. How does a single tree get noticed? How does the world find the saplings that are going to be the next Sequoiadendron giganteum? Does the forest work together as a cohesive eco-system?

Today, thanks to Microsoft Australia’s, Frank Arrigo, I attended the Blogger’s Brunch. Great of Microsoft to reach out to a section of the local technology blogging community. None of the attendees (except Angus Kidman and Nic) are famous in the blogosphere, but on the internets – noone knows you are an Australian.

Whilst having been a Microsoft customer since 1984 (Microsoft Basic 1.0 on a Macintosh 128K – and the box is in storage somewhere), I am a relative noob to “marketectural” Microsoft. The speak is strangely familiar to my ears.

The following are some random thoughts and un-expressed questions from this morning’s session:

  • To the Microsoft PR people. Sorry it paralleled Microsoft-Groove/Ray Ozzie history with Apple-NeXT/Steve Jobs. To Frank Arrigo. Sorry I stated that the *.live.com people are having fun being compatible with all the versions of Internet Explorer rather than implement Firefox support. Both of these were intended as jokes, not memes.
  • Today’s Australian Financial Review’s IT section has quotes from various large Australian financial organisations stating that they are taking a wait-and-see approach to Windows Vista. Some are only now installing Windows XP. These organisations state they will install Vista in 2-3 years. I find this quite interesting as it has taken them 4-5 years to install Windows XP. Personally, I am concerned if a large financial organisation is not running a recent, up to date, tested and secure OS on all their desktop computers. I’d love to know what features in upcoming products are direct feedback from Australian customers. This would show that the software development process is a two-way street.
  • Sharepoint should evolve into *.live.com server for the Enterprise. If Vista has all the hooks, and the connected/disconnected world and new applications are going to be mashed (lashed?) together with live stuff, this seems like a logical move. However, large organizations will be reluctant to put all their data into the world’s cloud for all to stumble upon. I am no expert on Sharepoint and all the positioning stuff, but it seems there might be a little “tension” (not a bad thing, mind you) between these two environments.*.live.com is garnering the mindshare as it is new-ish; many of the APIs and licensing models are to be determined. Come to think about it, these are probably the two reasons why they are still separate. Revenue and developer penetration.
  • After hearing about the IT professionals fawned over the coolness of Vista infrastructure deployment … I left the session (both mentally and physically) asking “what are Microsoft’s customers going to do with all these fine trees?”Customers doing meaningful stuff with Microsoft’s software so that they can impress their customers is where it is at. Marketing people might call it Unlocking the value of the platform.
  • Virtualization on the desktop has been one of my “things” for a while, so it’s interesting to hear that VirtualPC is to be included in the Enterprise version of Vista. Whilst listening to the intricacies of Vista vs XP deployment, my mind was racing thinking about the future of operating systems.So here goes: why is the Enterprise desktop so fat? Why not have a Singularity-based OS with .Net 3.0 Framework as the API. Win32 + other legacy apps could be virtualized to the desktop. As the world and work becomes more connected, the smart client at the edge of the network will have a different face.

In summary, I groked that Microsoft groks (sorry, Heinlein) the world as it exists today. Ensuring that no trees are felled in the rush to market is going to be an interesting challenge.

A/UX 3.0: Apple’s first Unix OS

History revisionists state that Apple had to buy NeXT as they could not write their own pre-emptive/protected memory OS.

Apple A/UX 3.0 integrated the best of System 7 and Unix. Maybe not the latest Unix available at that time, nor on the fastest hardware; nor with the best driver support. But it rocked for its time.

From memory, Apple needed to created A/UX to permit their hardware to be sold as “POSIX” compliant to US DoD. With more internal, less “not-invented-here” thinking – the need to have a bogus OS (Copland) and the ultimate reverse take-over by NeXT could have been avoided.