What's it all about, Alfie?

I just happened to be checking on a few things this morning, and one of the little unsung heros of my day is Growl. I really think it might be the next thing Apple pulls into 10.6. It's just an exceptionally handy tool to have at the system level - like tabbed terminal sessions (from iTerm) and virtual desktops, it's something that a lot of people like myself use.

Anyway, the point was that for the longest time, Growl had the same web site that didn't look all that great on Safari - at least how I looked at it. Today I noticed that they totally revamped the web site and it's looking much better. No new releases, but now they show the different styles as well as better docs, more screen shots, and a better look to the whole thing.

Nice update.

Acorn 1.2 is out, and it fixes the one bug that I had found: multiple magic wand selections to create the exact selection you wanted. In the previous version, for each additional selection you did, the image seemed to move down a bit. The result was that you really couldn't do the multiple selection properly. I had to resort to other techniques, which worked just fine. In the latest release, I'm glad to say that that bug - along with a ton of others, and quite a few new features has been added.

I once read that Acorn is a programmer's editor, and to that I agree. I'm not a graphical artist, but I know what I want for images, and Acorn makes it exceptionally easy to get what I need in and out. Wonderful app.

Given the state of web services and protocols these days, it's really pretty amazing that Twitter is as unreliable as it is. Before I even started using it, I had read many reports both praising the idea and cursing the implementation for it's unreliability. New things can start out on shaky ground, but as time goes on, they should stabilize out and get more reliable. But I don't see that happening with Twitter. I'm using Twitterrific and while I like most parts of the app, and understand they are working on an iPhone app for release in a few months, I have to say that I don't for a second think it's Twitterrific's fault.

So why is Twitter so unreliable? Can it be the load? Possible, but that's something that can be scaled up, and given all the attention it's received, I'm guessing that they aren't hurting for money to buy additional servers. So I don't think it's a matter of hardware.

Could it be the idea behind it? Doubtful, IM clients handle much larger packets of information and they aren't this bad. Also, given that it's not a 'push' technology, it's hard to understand the possible issues. Maybe it's the SMS or IM integration issues... don't know.

I've heard that it's all about being first. I disagree. That's a big factor, but it's not the end-game. Look at VisiCalc. Can't? Exactly my point. They created the spreadsheet and Microsoft beat them so badly that now most folks won't even know their name. Twitter? Twitter who? That's what might happen if they don't get the reliability up. People will like the idea and the barrier to entry is nothing for a Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft.

Ideas are great, but eventually you have to deliver. Twitter needs to get busy and deliver on the reliability.

While it might not seem like much, being able to upgrade WordPress from 2.3.3 to 2.5 was nice to get done today. It takes a little longer for Fantastico at HostMonster to get the updates, but they work like a charm, and I haven't lost a thing. Can't beat that. Unfortunately, there's already 2.5.1 out, and so I'm still behind. Not to worry, it'll catch up... and if the Google Summer of Code is right, we'll get caching in the default WordPress which would be really nice because the existing caching schemes make it seem a little non-standard.

I'm not about to get Slashdotted anytime soon, so I'm safe. When it's built into the WordPress release, I'll get it. But I do with they had better facilities for Privacy. There's really only the ability to mask out the search engines. I'd like to be able to work on an opt-in policy where I had to give people accounts on the install and then they could read it. That would be nice.

When I got home today my Kindle was waiting for me. I'm currently in the middle of Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin - about 120 pages in, so I didn't think I'd be using the Kindle until I finished off this 800+ page book. Amazon, and luck, proved me wrong.

What I think one of the nicest parts of the Kindle is that I can get recent releases at paperback prices. I'm not one to buy a hardback book for myself. I just don't. I wait until they come out in paperback and then get them. That means I'm about a year and a half behind 'current'. For about the price of a paperback, I can get new releases on the Kindle. That's really nice.

So I open up my Kindle and find out that it's already been set up for me. That's probably nothing for Amazon to do, but it's an amazing feeling to have it there, out of the box, and ready for me. Very cool. I read the introduction on the Kindle - on the Kindle, and then decided to check out a few books I've wanted to have 'on hand' to read. So I go to the Kindle store.

Very nice experience. Clean, decent. All I could have expected in a wireless delivery system. Very nice.

So I look up Clive Cussler and get his latest two that are out in hardback. It's next to nothing to get them, and $20 later, I have them. It's simple, fast, and enjoyable. I can see why people are saying this is the 'iPod of books'. It's not a perfect device, but it's darn close, and they have a very nice online store.

I then go to look up Goerge R. R. Martin and find out that I can get two eBooks - the one I'm reading and the next in the three-part series for the cost of the second one. I get them both. I then use the Table of Contents on the Game of Thrones to get to where I am in the 'dead tree' version. My Kindle is ready to use.

Amazing experience. Really. About the only downside I've seen is the carrying case. I'm not sure that I'm going to use it - I don't use one for my iPod Touch and just take care of it, but it would be nice to be able to 'lock' the Kindle so that accidental presses didn't mess with things. But maybe they can come out with that in a software update.

In any case, I can see that my reading will be changed forever. I'll pick up a 4GB SD card this weekend and plop it in the Kindle and be set for life. Really. I can't imagine ending up with more than 4GB of books on this thing, but that's a staggering thought. I only wish there were a way to get my physical books on the Kindle without re-buying them. That's the one beauty of the iTunes system and music. I can convert them by ripping. Can't do that easily with books. Shucks.

Today I ordered a Kindle from Amazon. I tossed and turned over this for months. When I travel each day to work on the train, I read. A lot. So I have tons of books that are sitting on my shelves in my home office. I have been looking for an alternative, and the Sony feels nice, but it requires a PC - and I'm not about to go down that road. Also, I was very interested in the "shop and read" functionality in the Kindle. When I finish reading a book on the train, I have to sit for the rest of the trip because it's too bulky to carry two.

I'm not sure that the Kindle is going to be everything in eBooks, but I think it's got a decent chance. I was waiting for the second revision of the Kindle, but when Amazon came back and had them in stock, it was clear to me that the next version was not real soon now. So I decided to go ahead and get it.

It'll probably be like my iPod - got a 3G and used it for years before getting the Touch which is exactly what I want. I'm not convinced that Apple is coming out with a book reader - but it'd be nice if they did. I think that this is something that Amazon is in a unique opportunity to produce and provide. They have the bookseller reputation. So I'm going to give it a go.

I'll post updates as I get it and use it. Should arrive sometime this week.

I've been working on my old simulation code a bit in the evenings and weekends now, just seeing if I could get the GaAs simulations to predict the oscillations of the 1D code. One of the things that hasn't bothered me - until now, is the timing methods used in the code. After all, I can time it on the wall clock and see how long it's taking, but I put in a decent level of effort all those many years ago to get the CPU split times for each phase of the simulation, and I thought it'd be nice to get them correct again.

I say 'again', because in the old f77 days, I'm sure dtime() was about as good as you could get. But in these new days of gfortran the values returned from dtime() are not in keeping with reality. I've looked at the GNU Fortran docs, and they say it's meant to return the elapsed seconds, but it's not. Maybe it's the build of gfortran I'm using, but I think it's more likely that dtime() is not what the new standard is using and I needed to move on.

So I did some digging in the code. Turns out F95 defined cpu_time() which returns the elapsed CPU seconds (as a real) for the execution of the app. This means that we need to put it into the code in a 'difference' mode - taking a reading at the top of the loop, and then at the bottom, and differencing the two for the incremental time that I was used to getting from dtime().

This wasn't all that hard, and in about an hour I had all the code re-fitted for the calls to cpu_time(). Thankfully, this is a much better timer and I get results that are making sense with the wall clock time I'm seeing for the runs. It's not like it's running any faster, or getting better answers, but it is at least more consistent, and I can look at the numbers and see what's more costly and from that see what I might need to do to alter the bias stepping, etc. Not amazing, but nice.

I was chatting with a friend of mine on Twitter - through Twitterrific and he mentioned that he had gone into the NIB for Twitterrific and removed the tooltips for the mouse-overs of the name and the image. This makes the UI a lot cleaner as it already says who it is and it already says when it came in - so it's all redundant, and if you have the mouse over the window you're almost guaranteed to have a tooltip pop-up. So he cleared it out. I don't blame him, but I thought it'd be nicer to let the developers know what we wanted, and maybe they could fit in an option on the tooltips. Worth a try.

So I emailed them and got a reply back that was not surprising, but a touch disappointing. They are focused on the iPhone version, and when that's released in June they'll go back to the Mac version and they plan a significant upgrade to the UI.

So it's going to get addressed, but it's not going to be ready until the Fall. Which in itself is an interesting statement on the speed of their development - or at least the time they can devote to it. Then again, maybe they have significant changes in store and a little option would only take a few days (tops), but totally re-coding the app might take months. Hard to see, but it's possible.

In any case, if I want to strip out the tooltips, I'm going to have to fire up InterfaceBuilder and hack at it. Not sure that's what I want to do, but it's something to think about.

The final test of my thesis simulator code was a simple gaussian pulse traveling down the empty channel of a Si MOSFET. The simulation of the first picosecond took close to a month on the school's Gould NP1 supercomputer. Today I finally tried running the simulation on my MacBook Pro to see if I could get the same results as well as see how long it'd take.

I had typed in the input deck this past weekend, but hadn't had a lot of time to run it and see what the results were. Today I just fired it off in the background and came back to it every so often to see if it had completed. What I found out was that I hadn't typed in everything correctly and I needed to increase the maximum number of allowed Newton iterations to get to the convergence criteria I had in the code. No biggie, but it would have been especially nice to have gotten it right the first time.

When I finally got the upper limit set right, it turned out that I did the complete 10 psec simulation in about 72 mins. It's all single-threaded code, so there's a possibility of optimization there if I spend the time to make the matrix solution multi-threaded, but the work to do that would be significant. Still... under 2 hours versus a month for a tenth the work. Yeah, computers certainly have changed in the last 20 years, but it's times like these that really accentuate it.

I'll probably try to do some of the simulations that I simply could not do at the time - like the GaAs channel, because in those results are the real questions of the thesis work: Was it a 1D simulation effect? and What will the frequency be when taking into account the 2D v(E) vector? In the end, I know what the results should say... it's real and it's reasonable, as after I left, the next student actually got one of my designs working. But still... it's nice to be able to finally close the book on that chapter of my life.

I've been involved with computers since before the days of widespread Chat, ftp and telnet. It was initially modems with teletypes or (if you were lucky) a glass tty (terminal). There was nothing to download to - save the box you were logged into, and then it was pretty much your entire world. If you wanted to look at another system you hung up and dialed it. Period. It was all we had, and in relation to what came before (keycards and terminal rooms) it was heaven on earth. But things changed.

Ethernet changed a lot, we got networks of machines in college - not yet PCs, and the old hobby machines of the 70's didn't have ethernet cards in them. If you wanted to have them talk to one another you did a special serial cable with Tx/Rx crossed and then you were good to go. But by the time you had widespread adoption of ethernet, you had networks, and when you had networks it didn't take long to have telnet, ftp and chat.

I can remember first using ftp to get at things across the globe while in grad school. There were newsgroups that might publish the site and directory of something useful, and then with anonymous ftp, you could go get it. It wasn't fast, and there were no Google-like search engines in place... you had to log in, search the directory tree for the file you were looking for... download it and hope it made it down before you lost your connection. Still, this was big computer to big computer, it wasn't until the PCs came out that you really saw the growth of the Kermits, XModem, YModem, ZModem file transfer protocols. FTP was almost forgotten.

But IRC Chat staged a massive growth, and telnet was the way to get from one machine to another. So not everything was forgotten. But fast-forward to today. It's amazing to me to see that ftp, chat, and telnet (ssh) are as strong now as they were in the early days - not because something better hasn't come along, but because the work put into the documentation way back then.

Look at the RFC for FTP or Telnet someday... it's amazing the detail they went into. I've implemented both, and was immediately impressed that the RFC was right on point with the intended audience - people wanting to understand and implement the protocol. The docs are very well written, complete and detailed, but not overly verbose and wordy. These things were written by people wanting to pass on this knowledge to others in the industry and make sure that there were no lingering questions and problems.

FTP is, to this day, a great way to get files around, and is in every web browser around. Telnet (SSH) is virtually unchanged - save for the additional security, but is just as useful. It's Chat that seems to have taken on almost mythical proportions.

Look at all the Twittes, IMs, IRC Chat clients. It's all the same, basic premise - I type and you see it, you type and I see it. They first version I used was even called type on the Unix BSD4.x systems at Purdue. But look how many ways you can now communicate through this little concept. You've got the store-n-forward of SMS or Twitter... you've got the IRC Chat and a ton of different IMs. It's as if this - communication between people - was the real killer app of the network. Sharing a computer meant files and resources of one were available to another. Putting the machines on different desks took that away - only to be brought back by the network.

I use Chat (Colloquy), IM (Adium), and Twitter (Twitterrific) all day every day. It's fun to think about where things started and how they have evolved over the years. I'm sure the video chat will be bigger when the bandwidth is there, but right now, it's just not. Give it time, though, and it'll be just like all the Sci-Fi movies you've seen. It's a great time to be alive.