All posts by Harry Underwood

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About Harry Underwood

Website designer, blogger. Columbus, GA. #LGBT #p2 #wordpress

Idea: wireless “dumb terminal” touchscreen display for smartphones

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OK, just thought about this last night:

I notice that most smartphones, including the multitouch fullscreen ones like the iPhone and Neo1973, are built as all-in-ones, with the hard drive and processing unit placed directly behind the display.

Then I saw the video of the most recent Macworld keynote by Steve Jobs last night, in which he introduced the MacBook Air. I had already read from Digg about how this new notebook computer, in order to accomplish one of the thinner laptop form factors, sacrificed such long-standing laptop components such as the optical disc (CD/DVD) drive, replacing it with an external optical disc drive that streams optical media data (even DVD-borne software titles such as Office ’08 for Mac or OS X 10.5) to the MacBook Air, where such data can then be copied or installed to the hard drive. This essentially rendered the MacBook Air, in Jobs’ words, a “wireless machine”; this may suit Apple’s modus operandi, which is directed more to digitally-transmitted data (iTunes) than to hard-based data on CDs, DVDs, or Blu-Ray/HD-DVD.

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Now, the following is becoming increasingly true:

The more mobile and free-wheeling the device, the smaller the form factor, the greater the network dependence, and the greater the need for interaction with the display.

The MacBook Air, the iPhone, and the iPod touch are all Apple’s mobile “wireless machines”. The software in these devices rely upon a wireless, streaming network in order for several applications to function correctly, and the interfaces use a greater immersion of the finger for various tasks, whether its widening a photo or dialing a phone number.

However, in the mobile industry (including Apple’s mobile products), most of the components (CPU, hard drive, etc.) are tied underneath the display (or, if its not multitouch, then both the screen and buttons). The same goes for other multitouch computer devices, such as the Microsoft Surface which is due for sale by at least 2009.

But what if the multitouch display could be used for the same communication purposes as your average smartphone without it being welded or tied to the computer that holds the hard drive and electronics?

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My idea is what I call “the commoditization of handhelds and other mobile computer devices”.

What this will allow is for someone to use one or more displays for a single, more stationary phone device, and for someone to cheaply upgrade their stationary phone device with greater hardware enhancements than would be feasible with the phone device tied directly to the display.

The phone device will “talk” wirelessly with the portable display, which doesn’t have a hard drive and very few electronic components except for those which allow for the display itself to function at all. The display will recognize any touch motions, which are then sent back to the stationary smartphone device where the operating system is stored. The smartphone is also wirelessly connected to the Internet though a wifi router.

This will be a more cost-effective approach to the creation of smartphones, as it will let both the computer and the portable multitouch display be true to the concerns within either components’ own domain.

This also allows for greater innovations within the display field that will eventually make it to the mobile market. This is one example:

The Green movement and sub-Saharan Africa

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OK, I don’t know how to put this down correctly, so this post will look a bit bleh.

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I don’t think that the Green movement will get that much foothold in Africa, at least not in the near future.

Right now, the dominant political parties in the countries’ parliaments and executive mansions espouse (at least on paper) some common threads: Pan-Africanism, religious conservatism, nationalism, and populism.

Also, most of these countries’s demographies, because of the history of cross-continental dialogue between Africa and Europe, tend to be averse to any political ideology or social cause of a supposed Western origin: anarchism, environmentalism, civil rights for LGBT citizens, etc.

The only case of an African “Green party” that is enjoying any publicity is the Mazangiri Green Party of Kenya, led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, who is an ally of the current (disputed) president Mwai Kibaki.

Heck, even the Green political movement in South Africa has taken a turn for the worse in the post-apartheid era. From the Wikipedia suggestion, most Greens in South Africa are currently allied with either the ANC or the DA, primarily because of how the most outstanding  (token) environmental excesses of the apartheid regimes, including nuclear weapons and power, were cleaned up or scaled down by the Mandela government.

Perhaps the most outstanding issue, however, in South Africa and most of sub-Saharan Africa, is the rise of AIDS/HIV, something that no national Green party has similarly incorporated to the very top of their political agenda (except for this; see if YOU can find the reference to AIDS/HIV in all that text). While Africa is scared as hell about this epidemic and its effects on their populations, livelihoods, and media images, most Green parties are more concerned with the prevention of nuclear power, whaling, or other matters which are of less populistic appeal to the electorates.

I would like to see that change, as I will either vote for a Libertarian or Green in November, but the lack of Green participation in national and local government in Africa is worrying to me.

“ur too poor”

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If there’s one thing that I’ve read online that particularly annoys me in its obvious sentiment towards those to whom it is directed, it is the following:

“ur just jealous bc ur too poor to afford one“, or something along those lines.

I call this “monetary/material ableism“, and only a mild case of it. It is most often displayed as a psychological/mental defense mechanism by the owner or “fan” of a particular product or brand against criticism of that product or brand.

Are we becoming more acclimated or accommodating towards such approaches to critics, feeling that we are more than sufficiently justified in the purchase of a product that we must defend the brand or product against those who, it is assumed, are less monetarily enabled to purchase the product and are thus suffering “non-buyer’s remorse?”

I might need to write something on my views on jealousy in another post.

Friday, January 4 would’ve been a useless date…

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If it wasn’t for watching this one video on TV at night (only because Wanda was watching it), after a day spent entirely in bed:

It’s not like I’m really itching for this winter quarter to start on Tuesday. In fact, I’ll be taking classes that I should’ve taken back in fall 2005, such as psychology.

But for right now, the daylight isn’t missed. I haven’t gotten any closer to where I want to be, or to what I exactly want to do.
Even asking questions – any question – is harder for me than it used to be.

Last quarter was my final technology-related quarter, and I’m disappointed that, while I passed, I neither did better than I could’ve, nor did I get what I really wanted out of it. I really wanted to create a wiki from scratch as my final project in “Database Connectivity”, but realized a few weeks before the end that I wouldn’t have the resources for accomplishing such a feat (it actually requires study material from certain university-level courses, as I found out from the teacher).

I hope that I don’t let this disappointment and anxiety take me over some unforeseen edge.

Plus, maybe it was a crash course, this whole program that I’ve taken; a highly embarrassing crash course, but one from which I’ve learned quite a bit.

This program, to be a bit retrospective, is something into which I’ve been wanting to delve since I was probably 9 years old, when we first got a computer (a spare from a friend at the church) at home. I used it, primarily to use Collier’s Encyclopedia on CD, and was interested whenever it had to connect to the Internet. So, I nagged my mother to get an ISP, but she was very set against getting AOL (she already detested the CDs in the washing detergent that they sold at the Commissary), so I found a mail-in Compuserve CD instead.

Don’t remember what happened next or if mom ever subscribed to Compuserve, but for some reason the computer either blue-screened, caught a virus, or something like that. Either way, the computer was rendered useless by whatever I did to it (I remember that I put a password into the BIOS configuration settings of the PC, but not much else).

But ever since then, I was strongly fascinated by the Internet/WWW, and wanted desperately to get onto it. I think the Digimon thing only aggravated my festering affinity for the Internet, and I tried every possible free, accessible means in order to make use of what it had to offer at the time.

I remember that, when “Digimon the Movie” had come out in theaters (in 2000, I think), I used a computer of my mother’s hair designer friend who lived much further down Watson Blvd. I looked at the Movie’s website using Netscape Navigator, making sure to head to another page when my mother was nearby for fear that she would find out.

By the time that we got the Internet at home (2004), Digimon was on the wane, I was on top of the Internet as far as I was concerned.

Oh, how the high and mighty have fallen, lol.

A history of Federalism in the DRC

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Come next year, the Democratic Republic of the Congo will be reapportioned from its current number of 10 provinces to 26 provinces, primarily in a move for greater governmental responsiveness to local issues and affairs. Plus, these new provinces will be given legislatures and the power to elect and impeach their governors (a power that is already given to the current 10 provinces since 2006), an unprecedented political concession in the country’s history.

However, this is not the first time that the DRC (also known as Congo-Kinshasa, to separate it linguistically from the Republic of the Congo, or Congo-Brazzaville, to the west of the eponymous river) has had a federalist approach to regional/local governance; rather, the central government in Kinshasa practiced a similar devolution during the days of the Congo Crisis from 1960-1967.

In this first devolution, the country was apportioned into a maximum of 21 provinces in a period from 1962 to 1966, when the majority of the provinces were remerged into 12, then 8 provinces and placed under unitary authority. Initially, this was meant as an appeasement plan in order to turn back any further regional secessions similar to what happened in Katanga in 1960-1963. However, after less than a year of shaky peace following the crushing of the Katanga rebellion, the “Simba” rebellion of Pierre Mulele was initiated and spread following the dissolution of Parliament by Cyrille Adoula in September 1963; it threatened to destroy the Kinshasa government’s authority over the eastern portions of the country, at which point, the government replaced Adoula with the leader of the former Katangan state, who then requested and received US and Belgian support to rescue nearly 2000 European and US civilian hostages in what is now Kisangani. They were rescued, the rebellion was put down, Mobutu overthrew both the president and prime minister and became the dictator of the country (which, from 1971-1997, was known as the Republic of Zaire), and Mobutu remerged most of the provinces into 8 provinces by 1966 (then reapportioned to the current 10 in 1988). Until 1997, the country would be a unitary republic under Mobutu’s rule.

After Mobutu, weakened by a short civil war that swept the country from the east, was overthrown by Laurent Kabila, a seasoned anti-Mobutu rebel who once counted Che Guevara among his comrades, the country soon descended into a second civil war, one that reached amazing levels of depravity and anti-humanity over a period of five years. This war, which also began in the eastern provinces because of a citizenship dispute involving a local Tutsi minority, and which received the discreet support of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, nearly succeeded in driving out the Kabila regime from Kinshasa; however, this trend was reversed after some 8 African countries sent their military operatives to support Kabila’s army.

During this period, some former provinces in the eastern DRC were restored under rebel control, namely Ituri Province (then known as Kibali-Ituri). This immediately led to the Ituri conflict involving at least two rival ethnic groups in Ituri, even after the province (which, currently and officially, is a district of Equateur Province) was retaken by government forces.

So now that the DRC has had its first national elections since its independence in 1960, this being under its most recent constitution, the country plans to return to the old federal model that was first used during the country’s first few years of independence, and for the exact same reasons and intentions as those which were used back in 1962.

But will this second fling with federalism work out, eventually, to the common intentions of all the country’s citizens – everyone from Joseph Kabila (the son of the rebel-turned-president) and Gizenga (an 81-year-old living legend who once served as head of a rebel government during the Congo Crisis and is the 23rd and current prime minister of the DRC) to the lowliest peasants and former rebels in Ituri? Will it succeed in bringing a greater equal distribution of the country’s immense wealth and potential to all parts of the country and all ethnicities and social minorities?

One could answer “No” emphatically, considering that federalism in other countries on the continent (Sudan and Nigeria) does not hold a good track record of working to the common interests of their populations, or at least were held back by the advancements of other institutions, including the militaries of those countries (and of others, as the military has played a long, and often detrimental, role in the political histories of most African countries).

So maybe the better question to ask would be “Is Congo presently ready to move away from a militaristic, violent, predatory, human-eat-human history to a civil, non-violent, dialogue-dependent, pro-human future?”

Maybe federalism – the type that is being envisioned by Kinshasa and the UN – is simply a feature that could accompany the latter, and not necessarily a stop-gap asset that is meant to prevent the former, as was intended for the first fling with federalism.

Soon, 2009 will be the present. It is up to those who are willing to serve as civil servants at the provincial and national level if they are willing to move toward the above future, rather than continue in the above past.

iPhone + Apple TV: what hasn’t been explored

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Well, the media hype has mostly died down surrounding the iPhone, at least in the U.S.

However, what I find lacking about the current iPhone is that it only integrates or interacts with one core product in Apple’s repertoire: the many iterations of the Mac (Mac Mini, Mac Pro, Macbook Pro, Macbook, iMac). What about integration with Apple’s other consumer-oriented products, like AirPort Extreme?

Or better yet, did it ever occur to Apple’s engineers that the iPhone (or the iPod touch) would integrate well with the Apple TV? Perhaps, as a touchscreen remote?

Well……it looks like they had caught a fleeting glance of it back in…what? 2005, you say? In the USPO, you say?

No, I don’t fully expect for Apple to make use of this patent in the next iteration of either the Apple TV (which doesn’t have iPhone’s bluetooth) or the iPhone (which doesn’t have AppleTV’s infrared). But, in my honest opinion, it would push for a more diverse purposing for the iPhone:

  • songs and movies (and even games) bought through iPhone’s iTunes Wi-fi Store can be streamed (or, to use the Zune’s parlance, “squirted”) to Apple TV – useful if you want to see/hear/play it on a TV screen
  • more interactive controls on the iPhone for Apple TV playback
  • User-chosen YouTube (and other web video hosting service) videos can be downloaded on the iPhone and streamed, again, to the Apple TV

Think of it as being a more handheld, mobile replacement for the Mac (well, that’s what Macworld said in October), being able to use the iPhone more with the Apple TV than you would use your Mac or PC.

This is what hasn’t been fully explored.

Sources and useful links:

Opera and Firefox – an explanation of “tactical open-sourcing”

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This question has been asked before: should Opera, the Internet client from Norway that you’ve probably used on the Nintendo Wii’s Internet channel, go open source like its closest cross-platform competitor, Mozilla Firefox?

It’s become a common complain with Firefox junkies, that Opera isn’t a viable option for web browsing because of the proprietary ownership of its company (Opera Software ASA).

However, IMO, Opera has an advantage in its proprietary approach to software, in that its developers can construct and deconstruct their own layout and scripting engines from behind closed doors without having to make sure that it works well with a slew of development APIs. To date, Opera has used at least 3 different layout engines, including the current Presto engine.

Meanwhile, Mozilla possesses a long history with third-party developers. Until recently, Firefox was simply the icing on top of the “Mozilla platform”, a stack that included the following sub-browser features:

  • Gecko
  • Necko
    • Necko provides an extensible API for several layers of networking from transport to presentation layers.
  • XUL
    • XUL is the basis of user interface. It is an application of XML that defines various user interfaces elements, mostly widgets, control elements, template, etc. It is similar in many ways to HTML.
  • XBL
    • XBL allows one to define his/her own widget for use in XUL.
  • XPCOM
    • XPCOM is an object interface that allows interfacing between any programming language for which a binding has been developed
  • XPConnect
  • XPInstall
    • XPInstall is a technology for installing small packages like extensions and themes into Mozilla applications in form of installation archives known as XPI.
  • Web services

This allowed for third-party developers to plug into the processes which made applications like Firefox and Thunderbird work and look like they do.

This also resulted in “feature creep” and “code bloat”, two controversial terms which no developer wants to hear or talk about. Besides becoming a poster boy for the emergent FOSS ideology, Firefox – in fact, almost all applications which have been built upon the Mozilla platform – also became quite infamous for the attitude of its developers to the growing anger over the application’s regular consumption of memory.

However, no matter how angry the users have become with Firefox’s outstanding issues, the Mozilla developers have consistently expressed their desire for incremental improvement, rather than total abandonment of such oldened processes like Gecko and XPCOM, due to the reliance of third-party developers upon these technologies.

This leaves the Opera browser with a technical advantage over Mozilla. There is much less of an audience of third-party developers who depend upon the underlying platform of the browser, which is only licensed to software companies such as Adobe for usage in their Dreamweaver product.

What about the future of either browser?

I think that Opera Software is, at present, planning to phase the browser further into the background as their widgets platform, which is mostly based on web-standard technologies like CSS, SVG and eventually Theora, becomes bigger and more prominent.

However, the Mozilla corporation, with its recent moves (such as ditching Thunderbird, leading to accusations that Mozilla Corp. has become the “Firefox Corporation”), may also head in a similar direction as well. Mozilla has expressed an interest in the advancement of web services and web applications which will make use of Firefox-specific, rather than Mozilla-specific technologies; it sounds similar to the widget

Does this mean that Opera and Firefox are on their way to competing as browser-based application platforms?

So when should Opera go open source?

In my opinion, Opera should only go open source once their business and development initiative is no longer focused exclusively upon the browser, but rather on the applications which depend upon the browser and the technologies which stand upon it, rather than its runtime, for function purposes.

When that time comes, they will no longer be focused upon incremental improvement of the already-established underlying runtime technologies which allow for the widgets to function, and would need help from outside.

Furthermore, open-sourcing the browser and its technologies will allow for other browsers and widget platforms to stand upon the shoulder of a formidable giant, one which is designed for designers rather than developers. This will lead to greater adoption of these standards in consumer markets. Open-sourcing Opera, in the long run, will benefit the WWW more than it may benefit Opera.

However, that is a long ways off from right now, when Opera and Safari are far in front of the other, larger browser vendors and their technologies.

Firefox, as long as it rides on the coattails of the Mozilla platform rather than realize its own, will remain in lockstep with the platform’s failures and shortcomings.

ODF, OOXML both suck – the fruitless pettiness of word processor format wars

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When a group of individuals known as the OpenDocument Foundation (not associated with the format except by promotion of it) annouced their intention to drop their support for ODF in favor of the Compound Document Formats, the uproar in response was rather loud. Even those who said that CDF might be a better format (actually, its a container for other XML-based formats rather than being a format itself) also stated that they would still support ODF because of the “need” to uniformly combat the dominance of MS Office in the workplace.

So…this is all about Microsoft again?

Frankly, this is the software world example of how the Democrats opposed Ralph Nader from running for president – twice. Or the South Carolina Democrats opposing Stephen Colbert’s mock campaign for president.

What is this – tactical voting again?

Plus, why is it that we simply *have* to prop up the word processor software genre? Isn’t it old hat already?

We have web browsers now, so we can view documents. We have wikis and blogs, so we can edit documents. Why do we need word processors or word processor formats in 2007 (maybe 1985, but in this day and age?)? Why can’t I view either an ODF document or OOXML/Word document in the web browser?

More or less, this fight between ODF and OOXML (or openOffice.org and MS Office) is a battle for the hearts and minds of big business, big government and big education, all of whom are still hopelessly dependent upon word processor documents for communication within their specific infrastructures.

This, IMO, is not a battle for the web-based grassroots, who, if it wasn’t involving the likes of Microsoft, would have very little ill-informed opinion or hot air to spout.

I think that, if it is simply a container for already-available web document formats and syntaxes, rather than being an all-in-one format that needs a bunch of extensions and hacky thingamajigs to be compatible with other formats and syntaxes (like ODF and OOXML), then CDF might have a technological heads up over the other two formats.

Plus, I like diversity. I like confusion, choice, duplicity, subversion and treason. Therefore, the third-party, whenever possible, will get my vote.

Telling a lie in a time of universal truth is a revolutionary act

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The above title, of course, is my subversion of a quote from George Orwell.

Everyone is looking for the truth, or thinks that they are in full possession of it already (and market themselves or their venture as if they have more of it than the last “authority”). Personally, I don’t believe in truth, and I question the truth whenever I can.
Why?

Because I think that truth requires belief, and that belief requires faith. And faith leads us to go batsh*t religious/fanboyish, with no regard for any other alternative answer or solution.

And that holds all of us back, IMO.

So my description of Wikipedia is not as a repository of universal truth, but as a growing repository of every lie and truth ever recorded, as long as it has cited sources. To me, that’s a good thing; it keeps us from drinking too much of any particular flavor of Kool-Aid.

ALSO:

At YouTube, Obama’s no longer a candidate for the Anti-Christ position: