Categories
technology

headmap

I must confess to being absolutely fascinated by headmap.org. I’m fascinated by the idea of smart spaces which infer user intent based on learned context. For example an office space that learns that automatically adjusts the heating in a room based on predictions about a meeting occuring. Lights that switch themselves off when there’s nobody around etc. The most value is achieved when the ambient intelligence is fully integrated with other organisational information systems such as email and IM servers, project management tools, data and profile repositories etc. I fancy the idea that every node in an increasingly networked world could dynamically negotiate new cooperative strategies and operations based on an understanding of user intent. A true User Oriented Architecture. This could be communicated using a standardised information markup with transforms for hetergeneous devices to address capability differences. I’m straying into agents territory here but there was a lot of value in that research. In essence,extending the human computer interface (HCI) throughout the user environment. In particular I like the idea about capturing memories at locations, augmenting the real world with location/memory tags, a bit like the virtual worlds created by multi-player games. The possibilities are amazing & the results would perhaps be indistinguishable from magic…

Categories
Uncategorized

Santa’s grounded this year kids

Thought I’d get into the Christmas spirit with a festive cartoon.
Ho, ho, ho!
santa_trial.gif

Categories
philosophy

Inspiring quote from Paolo Coelho

It’s Christmas time and as usual books are on the wish list. I was reading through an old Paolo Coehlo book recently and stumbled across the following great quote. Definitely words to inspire

“A warrior accepts defeat. He does not treat it as a matter of indifference, nor does he attempt to transform it into a victory. The pain of defeat is bitter to him; he suffers at indifference and becomes desperate with loneliness. After all this has passed, he licks his wounds and begins everything anew. A warrior knows that war is made of many battles; he goes on. Tragedies do happen. We can discover the reason, blame others, imagine how different our lives would be had they not occurred. But none of that is important: they did occur, and so be it. From there onward we must put aside the fear that they awoke in us and begin to rebuild.”
The Fifth Mountain – Paolo Coelho

Categories
technology

Where old computers go to die :(

IBM_AT_System_s1.jpg
While I was typing the last entry I wondered if there were any websites devoted to old PC technology. My sense of nostalgia overwhelmed me when I visited Old-Computers.com. In particular this article on the IBM PC AT brought it all back. I remember using one of these in school when I was younger. It had the 286 processor (which really kicked ass in its day) an outlandish 1Mb of RAM and 16-bit expansion slots, of course. This had a type 2 mobo with 4 standardised 256k slots instead of 128.. Those were the days.. when computers were dumb, real men used DOS, we played footie in the park, jumpers for goalpsots…
Apparently the 128 k slots were a bit weirder than they seemed initially.

The first AT used 128 k chips, which appeared to be two 64k chips stacked. It used two DMA chips, which tended to fail in tandem. It also used a second IRQ controller. If the AT had more than 640 k of RAM, the CMOS would only allocate the first 512 as Convential, the rest as Extended.
Only 17 hard drive type were supported in the CMOS, causing no end of headaches when Seagate realsed their 40 meg half height. The 1.2 meg floppy drive could read and write 360’s, but if you formatted one, it couldn’t be read by a regular double density drive.