A lot of folks these days have at least part of their home network on wireless ethernet, or WiFi. I have two wireless access points in my house, for example, and plan on adding a third. Wireless networking has security considerations: unless your WiFi network is encrypted, someone outside your home can use your bandwidth or, potentially worse, intercept your data. Wireless security was improved significantly a few years ago with the introduction of WPA (WiFi Protected Access) after the previous security method, WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol) was “cracked”. Since then, wireless networking has been pretty much secure against any intrusion. Until now…
My friend Chris and I have made going to airshows a tradition of sorts. Chris actually knows quite a lot about aircraft, whereas I am more of the “wow, that’s cool” mindset and only skim the surface regarding technical details. One thing I’ve found is that the airmen sent to these shows, presumably amongst the best in their respective forces, generally seem to be pretty nice people. At least on the surface I haven’t noted much of that “strutting arrogance” we expect to see pilots have based on movies and TV shows.
Mobile phones and “smart” phones have a ton of features: things like taking pictures, browsing the Internet, and playing games. Studies have shown, however, that only somewhere between 10 and 50% of the users of these feature rich devices know how to do more than make phone calls with them. Rich Miner of Google mentioned recently that the reason for this is mainly “bad UIs”. I think, however, that Rich is probably on the wrong track, at least for some users. Maybe even the majority of them.
Adam and Jamie of Mythbusters fame are cool guys. I enjoy their program and find it oddly educational, in a sort of geeky-destructive way. But I have to admit that the following video of a demonstration they did at an Nvidia graphics card conference really impressed the heck out of me. The first part of the video shows their interpretation of computer graphics using a single CPU, and the second part is their version of a massively parallel GPU rendering.
I was reading a news item the other day indicating that the Las Vegas Hilton is closing the Star Trek Experience in Vegas. This was one of the few things in Vegas, along with the fountains at Bellagios and the Siegfried and Roy Secret Gardens animal exhibit, that my wife and I actually enjoyed while we were there. But it was apparent when we were at the Hilton that they were barely putting any effort into the Star Trek Experience any more.
My blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic. It has never been referenced on Slashdot. No one Diggs me. Basically, folks who find my site do so via a search engine, more or less by accident, or are friends and family. The fact that my site has been here at kgadams.net for a number of years and I’ve made an effort to make sure I keep the search engines moderately happy means that I get *some* traffic: maybe ten thousand hits a month, more or less. Just so we are on the same page: many “moderately popular” websites get that many hits in an hour. Seriously popular sites get that many in a minute.
But despite the fact that my site isn’t generating massive influxes of visitors, I still care about performance. It bugs me when my main page takes more than a second or two to generate, or when my administration interface takes ten seconds to appear. So what do I do to improve responsiveness? Well, I visit another blog…
Microsoft has been working on something they call “Surface” technology. Basically, it is a touch sensitive user interface, and it is usually demonstrated using a large, flat horizontal LCD panel… a table. I’ve had my doubts about the usefulness of this technology outside of a niche environment- but I’m ready to be proven wrong. That said, I find the following video pretty effectively expresses my doubts…
I’m sitting here in front of my second computer, more commonly known as “Irene’s game computer.” It is going through the process of installing Windows Vista at the moment, for the third time in less than a week due to various hardware and driver issues.
Nearly 20 years ago, some scientists observed something that looked like room temperature fusion, or “cold fusion”. If such a thing actually worked, and generated net positive energy flow (I.E.: you get more energy out than you put in to start and maintain the fusion), the world could be changed in amazing ways. Unfortunately, no one, including the original scientists, has been able to reproduce the observations in the two decades since the original incident.
