Quinton Hoole's Blog

Lend a Hand

2005-05-12T22:10:00.000+02:00

Great little web site this: Lend a Hand
Actually this is an unashamed trick to get Google to index the above site, as I added a Google search facility for them recently ;-)

Disruptive Technology: Interesting how traditional wired telco's are feeling the pinch

2004-08-27T10:25:00.000+02:00

I've been well aware of this phenomenon from first-hand experience, but this is a good article on the topic.

Open Super-Computing and BeoWulf

2004-08-09T13:15:00.000+02:00

Wired News carries this fun article about the BeoWulf 10 year birthday party. Sounds like a fun technology to play with when I have some spare time.

eBooks: Two Opposing Views

2004-07-29T16:18:00.000+02:00

Gizmodo carries this article discussing obstacles to eBook adoption, while Boing Boing disagrees violently in this article. Both worth a read.

Software Devlopment: "Great Hackers", by Paul Graham

2004-07-29T16:16:00.000+02:00

I read This great essay about Great Hackers by Paul Graham today. Well worth a read.

Internet Telephony that actually works?

2004-07-27T23:25:00.000+02:00

I’ve heard a lot about Skype free internet telephony, so I decided to give it a whirl. You can get the software here (free, of course), and call me by clicking on Skype Me!. Much of the buzz around this software originates from the fact that it was developed by the founders of Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing software. There's an article about Skype here.

Gotta Love African Leaders

2004-07-21T13:26:00.000+02:00

Independent Online reports that the newly-elected president of Malawi, Bingu wa Mutharika, has asked parliament to move into a bombed sports complex so he can use the $100-million New State House as his residence.

Google Ads Fails Spectacularly!

2004-07-20T11:39:00.000+02:00

I found this ridiculous Creationist site advertised in connection with my blog on Evolutionary Computation. And this crap too. Quite amusing really. So much for contextual advertising ;-)

The Skeptics Society provides a wonderful remedy for the above kind of brain damage, as does The Foundation for Critical Thinking and
Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal which carries a great article on The Evolution of Creationism.

I really appreciate this except from the book Why DO People Believe Weird Things? (pp. 275-278, please excuse the flagrant plagiarism):

Credo consolans: I believe because it consols me.
Simplicity: Pseudoscientific beliefs are simpler and easier to understand than scientific ones.
Immediacy: Pseudoscience offers immediate gratification and hope.
Morality and Meaning: Science does not offer moral messages and answers to our questions about the meaning of our existence. Superstitions give us answers to these ultimate questions.
Hope Springs Eternal: ALL humans, skeptics and scientists included, look to the future for a better life and world, and the siren song of pseudoscience and superstition is hard to resist.

Oh, and An Index to Creationist Claims might also be interesting to some.

Software Development: "Commercial" Eclipse Distributions

2004-07-19T13:04:00.000+02:00

Having now spent some more time with the Eclipse integrated development environment I'm most definitely in love. But thank the pagan gods I happened to not be under huge time pressure, as the learning curve resembles an olympic ski-jump. Much of the complications in my case arose from my need to integrate with a variety of technologies, including Jakarta Tomcat, Jakarta Struts, JDO, XML, JSP, and others. To use these efficiently from within Eclipse you need to:

choose an appropriate Eclipse plugin for each technology (this is not as simple as it sounds - there are several to choose from for each technology, both free and commercial, not all of which necessarily do the job particularly well).
get the chosen plugins to work individually with the particular version of Eclipse you happen to be using (3.0, in my case). Again, this is not trivial, given that Eclipse 3.0 was only released quite recently, and not all of the plugins have been tested with this version yet.
get all of the chosen plugins to co-exist happily. In many cases this is simply a case of selecting the appropriate options correctly, and learning how to use them together - by no means an indictment on the Eclipse plugin architecture. But it's not difficult to end up overwriting the output of one plugin with the output of another, or ending up with more than one copy of the same file, simply 'cos you can't get the different plugins to all read from the same config file in cases where this makes sense.

It is my suspicioun that integrating a number of independent technologies like this is the norm rather than the exception, so I imagine that a lot of people are going through the same pains as I did. To make matters worse, I would guess that a number of developers are both learning the technologies (in my case JDO and Struts were relatively new) at the same time as the IDE (Eclipse in my case). Ouch!

Rather than try to explain all the problems I had, and tell you all the answers I found, I would suggest that it makes more sense to start with a "commercial" distribution of Eclipse, where someone has gone and done all the hard work for you. myEclipse and Yoxos appear to be amongst the contenders in this area. Although I have not looked at either of these distributions, my guess would be that it would be welll spent money for any professional developer.

Anyone have any experience with these products, or any opinions on the matter?

Software Development, Object Persistence: JDO versus ObjectSpaces

2004-07-14T12:52:00.000+02:00

This article provides an interesting comparison between Java Data Objects (JDO) and Microsoft ObjectSpaces. Chris Welsh got me thinking about how to ensure that applications written in different languages can all access the same database when using OR tools like JDO. I'm not sure how feasible this is, in which case it would be a very serious black mark against JDO. Hopefully I'm mistaken, and they've thought of this and have an elegant solution.

Software that Evolves?

2004-07-12T20:12:00.000+02:00

Ever since reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins I've wondered about the feasibility of writing software that evolves (in a Darwinian way, you understand - survival of the fittest and all that stuff). Would it be possible to emulate the process of evolution (by which complex life forms have evolved from much simpler life forms through random mutations) for the purposes of software creation? Many before me must have contemplated this. I wonder what the current "state of the art" is? This is not traditional "artificial intelligence" as far as I can see, and neither is it very closely related to "neural networks", from what little I know of those branches of computer science. Can anyone enlighten me?

The principle is quite simple - randomly altering a piece of software a large number of times (as in zillions of times) is a fairly simple and cheap operation. And testing the ability of the resulting (changed) software to perform a particular task could also be pretty simple, at least in a limited set of cases. So surely it should be possible to improve an existing piece of software by simply randomly altering it a huge number of times, and throwing away all the "mutants" which don't work any better than the original? And by repeating this over and over again (gazillions of times), it should be possible to produce very capable software, without any "conscious" design? Where's the flaw in my thinking? Sure, it will be difficult to define "better" and "worse" mutants, but that doesn't sound insurmountable. Any ideas?

Digital Photo Album Orgainsation

2004-07-12T19:42:00.000+02:00

Anyone got a good solution on how to archive one's personal collection of digital photo's? What I'm looking for is something really quick and easy to use, but which makes it fairly simple to find a photo, or group of photo's at a later date, even if my collection totals say tens of thousands of images over time. WinAmp does a great job of this for my music (together with a tag editor like Tag and Rename, but I'm looking for an equivalent for my photos.

I recently stumbled upon Adobe's Photoshop Album which seems to do a pretty nifty job given my basic requirements. What I really liked was the ability to create arbitrary tags (which can be structured into hierarchies if so desired). So for example I can create a tag hierarchy like:

- people
- - family
- - - dad
- - - mum
- - friends
- - - bald bob
- - - horny henrietta
- places
- - home
- - beach house
- - ski hut
- events
- - christmas
- - - 2003
- - - 2004

etc (sorry - got a bit carried away! :-0)
... and then I can attach any combination of these tags to any of my pictures. Of course I can add captions too.
And then by simply twiddling a few checkboxes (horny henrietta check, ski hut check ;-) I can filter through my thousands of images and find the one's I'm looking for. Once I've found the images I can play a slide show, burn a DVD, make a video etc.

Can anyone offer any advice on better solutions? One concern I have is that I don't want to tie myself into any particular software for now and evermore. Adobe Photoshop Album is great but stores all the info in some proprietary database, which is presumably not readable by anything other than their software. I'd prefer to go with an open standard (equivalent to ID3 tags for MP3 files), which are supported by almost all software. Is there such a standard? Can anyone recommend any good software (preferably free) which supports this format?

2004-07-12T19:39:00.000+02:00

Karin, my wife, closing billion dollar deals while ignoring the trillion dollar views.

2004-07-12T19:34:00.000+02:00

Taking a quick kip after a tough day's sailing.

2004-07-12T19:30:00.000+02:00

Did we feel like wannabe's? Of course we did, when we came across this old gem, skippered by a very salty looking old chap from the West Coast of Sweden.

2004-07-12T19:23:00.000+02:00

A nice shot from a recent sailing trip in Sweden (see blog below). This is an island just outside Grebbestad.

Flying Thinkpad?

2004-06-30T15:00:00.000+02:00

From a mate of mine, Sean McLeod:

Feel like flying with a Thinkpad laptop? ;-)

A lot of the new IBM Thinkpad laptops have accelerometers in them to detect hard-knocks and to detect when the laptop is being dropped in order to park the hard-drive heads so that they don't damage the hard-disk.

Using the 2-axis accelerometers it's possible to calculate the pitch and roll angles of the laptop assuming that the laptop isn't currently accelerating.

So hooking up this data from the accelerometers into my PFD (attitude indicator etc.) software I've got some attitude on Marcelle's Thinkpad. See the attachment for a demo snapshot of it in operation.

The original idea came from here.

Nerd Stuff

2004-06-30T14:26:00.000+02:00

War Kayaking seems fun.

"Genome" by Matt Ridley

2004-06-30T14:25:00.000+02:00

I'm busy reading this great book called Genome by Matt Ridley.

Java Data Objects (JDO) vs Hibernate

2004-06-30T14:23:00.000+02:00

Java Data Objects (JDO) also seems like a very promising technology, although the apparently politically motivated battle with Hibernate appears counterproductive for the Java community as a whole.

Software Development: Eclipse

2004-06-30T14:15:00.000+02:00

To allow comments on individual items I guess I should separate them out. Live and learn...

Eclipse seems to be a great IDE. I've just started using it, but the more I find, the more I like it. My suspicion is that, while it may not yet be quite as good as Intellij IDEA, it will over time become the dominant IDE on the basis of it's price (free), and support in the form of numerous plugins. Also, the fact that it is language-agnostic is a great bonus for us multi-lingual polyglots ;-)

2004-06-30T13:43:00.000+02:00

Quaffing a bit of bubbly at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town

From the Nordic Climes

2004-06-30T11:04:00.000+02:00

This is my first foray into the wide new world of Web Logs, initiaited while away from my home base of Cape Town. Right now I'm in Gothenburg, Sweden, after having spent a week at the World Gliding Championships in Norway, and a week sailing amongst the hundreds of islands near Strömstad and Grebbestad. A map will give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

A few more random thoughts and then I must get back to some real work:

Software Development:

Eclipse seems to be a great IDE. I've just started using it, but the more I find, the more I like it. My suspicion is that, while it may not yet be quite as good as Intellij IDEA, it will over time become the dominant IDE on the basis of it's price (free), and support in the form of numerous plugins. Also, the fact that it is language-agnostic is a great bonus for us multi-lingual polyglots ;-)
Java Data Objects (JDO) also seems like a very promising technology, although the apparently politically motivated battle with Hibernate appears counterproductive for the Java community as a whole.

Culture
I discovered today that Google provides a great summary of trends in it's Zeitgeist.

Evolution
I'm busy reading this great book called Genome by Matt Ridley.

Nerd Stuff
War Kayaking seems fun.