The Accidental Weblog

Thing is, a little while ago now, I let my account on a certain server whereon it lived for many, many years lapse. I kept meaning to fix that account, bring that server back to life, put the thing back up there for a while, with big flashing redirection links saying it’s moving here permanently, yadda yadda…

Didn’t happen. Mea culpe. I’m badly busy. Honestly, I didn’t even realize anyone was using it anymore. And then people started finding me asking me what gives…

So here it is. Now. Yes, I could have done this more gracefully. Forgive me. Thing is, I kept meaning to retire that installation, move everything from over there over here, move on with life. And this kinda pushed me. Anyway…

Anyway: in hopes that Google and their peers/competitors find this and index it and the many links around the web eventually find it again, it now lives at:

AJ’s Cosmic Thing.

Tell your friends, anyone who uses it. And note also for those of you who know what it is that yes, Gienah also still exists. Hasn’t been developed in years, either, but does have some kickin’ catalogs compared to The Thing, and can be found here:

Gienah.

I had a little fun bringing this code back, honestly. True story: some of the source on the Thing is from late 1996. That, my friends, for the web, is close to prehistoric.

… now with 80% more feedback squeal.

The occasion is: I’ve installed Rakarrack, a guitar effects processor for Linux, and it really did seem I could do so much more with that lead line.

Mind, what I really have to do is re-record that lead—or at least bits of it—tighter to the rhythm. But in the meanwhile, here it is with a Rakarrack effects chain beefing up the signal out of a plain ole’ soundhole pickup. MP3, Ogg (3:40; 4M, 16M respectively).

So… umm…

(Blushes…)

I did get a Galaxy Nexus.

Yes, yes, I’m pretty much the king of ‘whatinhell does anyone really need the latest and greatest for, when smart fingers can make any old tech do miracles?’. But my old Nokia S60 smartphone thing (yes, I actually own one… an XPressMusic 8500… just possibly the last one actually operating in this hemisphere) was getting beyond flakey/annoying (weird h/w glitch… or I think it was h/w… video kept going all illegible, like it was repeating the same scan line for the whole screen, and you’d have to bang on it and unlock/lock it repeatedly sometimes for minutes to make it stop and work again… and this was particularly annoying when trying to take video of the little guy’s last race and I’m trying to do this and follow along down the mountain at the same time) , and I got to thinking, shopping ‘round for the next thing, gee, wouldn’t it be cool to have something for which the local shops actually stock stuff, and for which people actually write software?’ As that was really getting to be a problem for the Nokia….

The punchline: it’s been really hard getting a second battery for the Nexus. Damned thing’s too new. Local shops are all like: ‘What? It’s out now? Damn. No… no battery… but can I see that thing?’

So… umm… on balance: still kinda annoying, but yes, when I can actually keep it powered (more on that in a sec), it’s very cool. Got the whole Android SDK thing set up on a laptop, seeing now just what one can do with such things.

Oh. But yeah. About that battery? It really (expletive deleted) needs one. Seriously. There’s articles on the net on how to get a whole day out of the battery (by shutting down auto update stuff, turning off 4G, perhaps just getting out of the high tech industry entirely and into a monastery and taking a vow of network silence) like that’s some kind of marathon endurance goal thing to shoot for, and I’m rapidly grasping that yeah, with 4G and a dual processor, I’m afraid it is. Contrast: my now-too-jittery S60 thing would run for all of a week sometimes, depending on how much I put it through… And it did have a (tiny, resistive) touch screen and a browser and a note taking thingy and a JVM and a video camera too…

Anyway, yes, apparently this is progress… and now I can either go for the massive 3.8 Amp Hour aftermarket battery (and the pickup truck to carry it… and maybe a driver for the truck to chase me down the mountain, and thus keep phone and battery reasonably handy) or I can get used to charging a second one and keeping it in reserve… or I could just get used to staying off the mountain and perhaps in a coffee shop with lots of outlets or something and thus close enough to something I can charge it from…

Still, okay, sure, it is blazing fast, where the network supports that. And the screen is pretty. That’s totally worth having to plan your life around places to plug it back in, right?

Oh. Wait. I know… I’ll get a little obsolete S60 thing… get Joikuspot for that… and the Nexus can borrow its connection via wifi…

I kid. I kid. It is impressive. Fast, pretty, programmable. And I can now get a new stylus that works for it in any damned ‘The Source’. Could be worse, I guess.

(/… also, I’d like to point out that even Stross’ ‘Bob Howard’ eventually succumbed to a Glamour-enhanced Jesus Phone. So I figure I’m in good company here, at least.)

Just crazy busy. Work. Tremblant. Sleep. Between these things, life is very full.

Oh. Right. And now and then I eat. But that’s really only now and then.

Oh. Also, I wrote a nice little Clue/Cluedo-ish murder mystery game for Linux, with a curses-based GUI, in late spare hours at the condo, ‘cos my daughter was looking for one and it was surprisingly inconvenient to get one any other way—for money or no—on any of the platforms we had around. There was one for Linux already out, but the computer didn’t actually play against you in that one, so that seemed wrong. In mine, it plays back. And sometimes wins, even, if one of the virtual players gets lucky, or the humans really don’t.

I may add a less geeky/more user-friendly GUI to it later. And/or put it up here or on SourceForge. We’ll see. Like I said: busy.

Oh, also: my lovely daughter is doing well. We managed to get down Tremblant’s kinda-lethal Dynamite run together this morning. And my little guy was athlete of the month in his program, and generally coming out with some pretty good form in his races. And while the season started a little sketchy snow cover-wise, we had a nice couple days, just now, after a pretty serious storm piled up some powder between the hard-packed moguls. Legs properly tired, now.

Yeah, yeah, I know. They’re getting a mite less important, in the age of 802.11x, as is the PC in the age of portables. Or so is the buzz.

And yes, I do run a wireless hub, too, next to my pretty Gigabit switch. Against my general security paranoia was the reality that we’ve more and more devices just aren’t particularly convenient to connect to an RJ-45 jack. Like WiFi-capable phones, so on. And laptops, okay, it is nice not to have to plug in.

But wired, people. Wired. Remember wired? You used this copper stuff, strung it between stations, and didn’t have to worry after having done so about some guy parking his van at your curb, hacking your piddling WEP nonsecurity and thereafter attempting to upload viruses to NORAD through your WAN drop? And it was fast and insanely reliable? That stuff, remember? Granted, yes, burying 8-conductor cable prettily in the walls of something from the first half of the 20th century does require a fish tape and a drill and a crimping tool and a respirator for when you go in the attic from hell and no small amount of patience and probably a beer and/or psychiatric counselling for the PTSD afterward, yes… But once you do get it in there, baby, it’s one billion bits per second either way (and that’s like the default, now), and no messing around.

This missive, speaking of, comes on the occasion of my finally fishing a few such wires to new drops on our second floor, the better to serve my wife’s Mac, which was cranky about WiFi on the best of days (and downright insolent on the worst) and whatever else digital and wire-capable gear might eventually live more full-time up there along with it. And pardon the geek moment, but It’s such a nice moment, too, after the grunt work of drilling and the occasionally incredibly frustrating try and try again of fishing through walls, when you plug that sucker in and see that ‘2 Gbps (duplex)’ thing light up at the one end, and the amber light come up on the switch. Things worth waiting for, y’know. None of that instant gratification of wireless. In my day, kids, we sweated blood to get a network connection. And it was uphill both ways. And we liked it.

I made some concessions, however, to the modern world of portables. This one, especially: never mind using your fiddly bronze age shiny piece of reflective glass (they call them mirrors, now, I hear?) technology for finding where the fish tape is in the cavity—how ‘bout sticking that tiny, conveniently narrow smartphone in there through the hole and taking a digital picture with flash? I kid you not, I did this on two of the difficult bits, this time, and it worked brilliantly*.

The other good thing I can say about wireless technology: how its proliferation drives the cost of wired gear down. Ethernet-only print server for the somewhat aging HP LaserJet I want to put directly on the net, so I can share it without any of the big CPUs having to stay awake? $20 is plenty, thanks, sir. We’re having trouble selling them, for some reason.

Can’t argue with that, anyway.

(*/The predictable bit: this happening initially because it was easier finding the phone than a suitably compact mirror. So I guess this must be 2011. And, probably, more than a few places in the world, right now, there are women doing their makeup on the subway using the forward-facing lense on their smartphone.)

As you may have heard, the online world is rapidly going more and more mobile, and those mobile devices are getting smaller and smaller. I was talking a few days ago at Tremblant to a neighbour I bumped into there—a gentleman runs a tech company of some dimensions—and he was saying he figured pretty soon he’d be able to do without a laptop much of the time; his smartphone would do for him almost all that larger device used to do.

I see things much the same. But it’s a world coming together in fits and starts. And there’s these weird little gaps I keep finding…

… like, say, that tho’ I could easily find a nice little OSS-type app to do ssh stuff from my lil’ S60 touchscreen thing—either as native S60 code or through the Java ME—no one seemed to have got ‘round to doing an scp client in either.

This, obviously, would not stand.

So. Behold my (currently horrifically alpha/proof-of-concept/use at your own enormous risk/actually, don’t even use it yet; give me a few more days, tho’) midlet for doing simple scp fetches from just about anything that runs a Java ME:

scpmidlet.

It’s.. umm… limited. Like enormously. But that’s not so much a feature of the actual capabilities of the underlying libraries as it is the fact that I’ve really only put a few hours into this thing in total, so it’s really just at the point where it does one useful thing, and without much in the way of such niceties as hardening against error conditions…

More to the point, what I think is a little scary here is how everything had evidently gelled to the point where pulling together the fundamental transport stuff was all but inevitable. There were various ports of libraries lying around and snippets of demo code. Like that bit of the future was almost there… but no one had gone the last mile…

Or honestly, more like the last six centimeters. As this did take just those few hours to do, including setting up the development environment.

Anyway. One more stone in the bridge to the future.

You’ve probably already found it. But Damn You Auto Correct is good for a laugh or ten, if you’ve a few minutes.

Related: I generally have avoided predictive systems, dictionary-based stuff in general. Not so much because of issues like this one as they used to be so annoyingly hard to train, and that used to be generally pretty necessary… Besides which, there’s another whole essay in there about the very philosophy of, effectively, picking words from a list versus composing ‘em yourself…

But my lil’ Nokia stylus-based smartphone recently got its own implementation of the Swype interface, and I have to acknowledge it’s pretty decent, as such things go, for what that’s worth. Many common vaguely anglo given names and surnames seem to be in it, the dictionary seems otherwise wide enough outside certain more specialized vocabularies (What? It doesn’t have the minor geologic eras in it? Weird) and it’s also pretty easy to add stuff just by pecking it out…

I still want something faster, tho’. As I opined somewhere else: for those of us used to being able to do some 100 wpm on a proper keyboard, while getting close to the 50 or so they say is theoretically feasible with this system is better than other mobile stuff I’ve used, it’s still a mite constricting.

… it’s also kinda amusing to imagine: yes, it learns, and that means when you play games with the language, pop off the odd neologism, glue together bits of words that previously weren’t, presumably, it’s adding all that to its DB, as you go, too…

I get to wondering how bizarre that might make the experience of using my phone for someone else.

(/Damn you, extremely weirdly-populated autocorrect.)

Yeah, I know… you see that phrase in a film, a book, wherever, and you may generally safely assume: additional suckage will abound. It’s not something you see in anything you’d actually want to watch without popcorn or a potential sexual partner present and/or read without strong liquor present…

But now and then, y’know, in real life…

So I’ve been mucking around adding stuff to PSPKVM—this Java VM for the PSP. My main thing has been input, ‘cos that’s my thing. ‘Cos I type fast, need/want something portable that can soak that up. I’ve pretty much got that working now…

One of the odd annoyances was, tho’, that screen real estate was always a problem.

Now on the semichordal board, this was only a marginal problem. Or it was for me. Since I don’t tend to look at it much when I’m typing anyway, now, so I could just turn off the key display, work without it entirely… But it did add keystrokes when, for odd keys you still don’t remember, you had to blink it back on again for a sec or so. And for folk learning it, they do like to be able to see it all the time.

And that’s annoying and difficult, because it takes room. The PSP’s screen is big for a portable device, sure, but if you start chopping stuff off the side to make room for the key layout display, it does make a difference. You miss having that room for the text. Be nice if you didn’t have to do that…

And then I added a ‘Danzeff’-style virtual board clone for certain users who were asking for the same (proles, I tell ya… good as Danzeff is, mine’s a lot faster, once you get to know it… but sure, Danzeff is easier to learn… Hell, integral calculus is probably easier to learn than mine, okay, sure…). And for that, you’ve got the same problem. It’s yer basic reactive online board… You need to see where the keys are, at least the rarer ones, and for beginners, you need the display up all the time, really.

Other virtual board types around had just bitten the bullet, chopped space off the fullscreen textfields to do this. I didn’t want to do that. For one thing, it’s a bit of a waste, since the boards are around a quarter of the screen, and typical (rectangular) text box implementations pretty much require you to chop them to half, leave a whole pile of space unused… Coulda made them wrap around the board, too, but that’s a lot of code, too, also odd… And it still eats real estate in the text box…

But then I got to thinking… hey… what if you overlaid the board over the text pane… And just had it move out of the way when someone was going to type under it? Pop it over to the opposite corner of the screen just when you need to or somethin’?

I know what you’re thinking: sounds like it would be… weird. I had the same thought. A bit strange, maybe hard to get used to… Who knows…

And yes, it is a bit strange. But in a good way. Because I tried it out in a build the other day, got it doing that right, and actually: I absolutely love it. Board display is kinda helpfully hanging around in view if you need to consult it, but it stays away from the cursor. And if you come too close with your text, it jumps away like a skittish kitten…

But not too far, see. Hangs out on the opposite corner of the screen, sayin’: ‘hey now, we can still play. The jumping part, that’s just what I do when I play.’

Crazy enough—or just weird enough—to work, see. And I’ve put it in a downloadable build, now, as it’s just perfect, the way I see it, really very nice to work with. You get your whole screen, you get your keyboard display, too, and you don’t even have to think about it… it’s just there for when you need it, out of the way when you don’t…

So it’s got that ‘you read my mind… and thanks’ quality about it a really weirdly clever (if I do say so myself) interface sometimes has. A good thing, methinks.

‘Kay. So it’s more a conquest of the Java VMs on the PSP world. Point is: things are moving along.

I’m doing this entry on Bolt, yet another J2ME browser the VM runs happily. Working on the semichordal board has become convenient enough now that I regularly edit the project wiki entries using it—using both Bolt and Opera Mini. I regularly also use the thing as a portable notetaker, too—it’s more than fast enough.

We’ve another release coming out shortly, too—with various enhancements to text support, a few other things…

(Today Albuquerque… Tomorrow…)

… wit’ fun, scratchy geetar ‘n muted trumpet…

(Smallish but sharp version is embedded below… if your bandwidth is up to it, it looks much, much better in HQ and original size… you have to go to the page and pick ‘HQ’ and ‘Original size’ from the menu on the lower right.)


(… and yes, I only really did it for an excuse to play around with RoseGarden again. Ya got me… And yeah, that’s Thelma in the background, in the first few frames. She seemed to figure she should be in the shot, so I didn’t argue.)