INovation

Computers keep getting smaller. But one thing that will have to change if computers continue to get smaller, is what kind of interface will be used to interact with them. Keyboards can’t get much smaller and still be usable. Talking to a computer may be the future, but that is still a ways off to be practical. That reminds me of comical Star Trek movie segment where they go back in time and Scotty tries to talk to a present day computer.

 

But the most fascinating work that I have seen to date is being done by a young gentleman by the name of Pranav Mistry from MIT. He recently did a demonstration of his work at a conference. It is far too amazing to describe. It it best to watch the videos.

 

Ruby continues her work in the Philippines. She has arranged all of this on her own, after recruiting some friends and co-workers. To see 100% of your donations go to work…

Paypal: brillantesruby at gmaildotcom

My friend Ruby Brillantes, (a fellow ex-pat and Canadian) with the help of some friends, has made a huge difference for 100’s of families who were victims of the flood in the Philippines. She has taken $1300 and provided food and necessities to many families. Below is her update. Many times people are reluctant to contribute to charities because you hear about the high percentage of dollars that go towards administration and bureaucracy. Now you have a cause where 100% of the dollars go directly to the victims.

To contribute via Paypal: brillantesruby at gmaildotcom

Update
”””””””””””’
Sunday, October 4th

With 22,000 Pesos on hand, Janet and I went to Makro (like Costco, for the masses – we didn’t go to S&R – apparently their for the “haves”). We picked up groceries and went straight to “River of Joy” Fellowship Centre in Manila. When we got there, there was one elder in the centre and a fellow named Jun sitting outside on a bench. He said that’s where he lives and he sleeps in his Jeepney at night.

We recruited Jun and put him to work with us. We re-packed 110 Care Packages. Each package contains 2 cans of sardines, 2 dried noodles, 1 juice drink, 1 bottled water, 1 “everything” soap, 2 small chips, 1 toilet paper and 1 sanitary napkin amounting to approx PhP 7,500 and we gave the elder PhP 4200 pesos to buy 100 kilos of rice to be distributed together with our goods. In total we spent PhP 11,700 pesos for the children of Manila North Cemetery – hopefully to reach out to 200 families.

I also allotted 500 pesos for gas = $10 for our drive all week

After Manila, Janet and I went to Hi Top Supermarket – same as Makro and we bought the same thing again. We spent about PhP 5,500 pesos. We could not buy everything at once as Janet’s car is 20 years old. We are afraid that it might not cooperate with us if we overload. (Good old Toyota Corolla – they’re great cars!). It is the only vehicle we have to do our escapade for the day/week.

We drove to Project 6 next, as one of my friends from high school owns a rice store. We had 3 sacks of rice delivered to my apartment that evening. = PhP 5,000 = a little over $100. So for yesterday, we spent approx PhP 22,700

Today is Monday, October 5th. I have no work until around 8:30 pm tonight.

Janet showed up at my condo unit bright and early. We started to re-pack the groceries we bought yesterday. A friend from our office joined us and used his lunch and breaks to help us pack. We re-packed about 100 care packages. Each package contains 2 cans of sardines, 2 dried noodles, 1 juice drink, 1 “everything” soap, 1 chocolate chip cookie bag, 1 toilet paper and 1 sanitary napkin. We also bagged 100 kilos of rice – (1 kilo per bag = 100 bags of rice for 100 families).

I also withdrew another 22,000 Pesos.

I ordered 6 more 50 kilo bags = 300 bags (1 kilo/bag) of rice to give away = PhP 10,000 pesos. I am reserving one 50 kilo bag for our cook out. The re-packaging will be done all week.

In total, we will have 400 one kilo bags of rice and 100 care packages = 500 families.

On Saturday, October 10th, our crew (me and my office mates) will be braving the City of Pasig – one of the most devastated area. We will hit 3 townships inside the city. (I will need to buy a pair of boots…..but if the water is waste high, I guess I don’t have to!) We will do a cook-out – make Arroz Caldo. I am using the one 50 kilo bag of rice for that. (For my friends in Canada, this is like Congee in Chinese Food). This is the easiest to make and hand out, as well as the cheapest. I would say spend about PhP 5,000 plus purchase bottled water to go with each bowl of Arroz Caldo. We will also buy all ingredients on Friday night plus buy a trail load of bananas. This place is still under water – we have to figure out logistics through each township leaders. I was informed that for those areas were water had subsided, the people are practically shovelling the left over mud. Most, however, are still under water – with garbage afloat. Some merchants are charging for boat rides of up to PhP 200 persos per ride. Just to give you a perspective, some people earn that for a day. (I am so glad I have my IPOD docking station – my daughter sent it to me and I can use it then… a little soothing or upbeat music …hhmmmm would be nice I think )

The cookout plus our 500 bags of “goodies” …sounds good!

When all this is done, I will have approx PhP 5,000 pesos (if the bananas doesn’t cost much with the bottled water) and $129 in the bank. This money, plus whatever is coming in, I plan to work with my friend Angelo who’s sister Aiko Melendez works as one of Quezon City’s councillor. She was the first to reach out to the depressed areas and has the guards, vans and people to deliver the next set of goods. It was with them that I experienced my first journey and if they didn’t have the logistics in place, I would have been trampled along with her family. Also going out with them gives me the greatest experience of reaching out. They’re not afraid.

If there’s more money coming in after this, I will keep going and add on to this.

I think that’s money well spent.

For now, on behalf of all of us here and the flood victims, we thank each of you for all your thoughts especially to those who sent us money. I was able to raise $1385.14.

I will give you one last update (and hopefully pictures) after this weekend.

I believe we made a difference.

Thanks again.

Ruby

I recently had the opportunity of accepting an international position. As I was moving out of the country I contacted Rogers (Canadian cable TV and Internet Service Provider), to let them know I would be cancelling my wireless accounts. We had a total of 3 wireless accounts in our family. My wife and I had our accounts for years along with our phones. Out daughter had only recently upgraded her cell phone. Well needless to say I was a little shocked when Rogers told me there would be $1400 in cancellation charges. I said, I could see how there would be a charge for my daughters phone, as wireless companies amortize the cost of the hardware over the length of the service plan, so I expected to pay the $400 cancellation charge. However, for the other 2 phones, which were never even purchased from Rogers I did not understand why I was being charged $500 each.

Rogers explained that because of the data and voice plan that we had there was a $400 cancellation charge for the voice plan and an additional $100 for the data plan. I said that this was ridiculous as there was no hardware amortization involved, and it was simply at service plan. I also pointed out the extra charges we had paid on a number of months for going over on our voice minutes. They said yes, we see that, but the cancellation charges still stand.

Then I came across an interesting web site. Called the Commissioner of Complaints for Telecommunication Services. I simply went on their site and filled out the form explaining my situation and that I was willing to pay the $400 cancellation, but that the other $1000 was robbery.

…and what do you know. About 6 weeks later I get a call from “The Office of the President” at Rogers. I spoke with a woman there who explained she had received my complaint and agreed to waive the $1000 fee and only charge the $400. She said she would put a note on my account, so when it came time to cancel, simply refer the agent to the notes and all would be good. In addition I received a letter summarizing what they agreed to do.

Only in Canada eh!

As today is the day that all of the US switches their over the air signals to digital. I thought it would be a good time to update a popular post HDTV Explained

Click on the link for the post.

It has always amazed me how complicated vendors make it to set up a WiFi network at home. Case in point. I am currently in Saudi Arabia. My sister lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She recently received a new laptop and wanted to connect to her WiFi router. When I was out there in 2008 I had set up their home network for them and written down all the important passwords such as the router administrator password and the network key. That was over a year ago and things get misplaced. Thanks to Skype I was able to talk to her about some of the things to do, but without those key passwords, there was only so far I could go.  So I took the last step of resetting the router and proceeded to set up her home network for her. Usually this could have been a very long process if I had to describe this over the phone to someone who is not technical. Trying to explain to a non-techy how to enter http:// by itself can be confusing for some. But I was using Crossloop which allowed me to connect to her laptop and do all the work as if I was sitting right there. Now I know that the latest version of Skype allows you to share screens, but when you are rebooting routers, you loose the connection. So I was using Skype to call her land line. With Skype subscription service, I pay $3 a month for unlimited calling to North America.

Crossloop is a very simple program to use. You go to Crossloop.com and register an account. The registration and use of the software is free. Then you download the application and start it up. You have 2 tabs depending on which end of the call you are on. If you are the one needing support, you click on the Share tab. You will be given and 12 digit number. The person doing the support clicks on the Access tab and enters your 12 digit number that you give them, and clicks on connect. After a few seconds the person getting the support is asked if they want to connect, they click on the connect button and say yes they want to allow the person giving the support access to view their screen. From then on it was like was sitting there on the computer in Vancouver (except for the +25 degree difference in temperatures).  Crossloop is very secure as it generates a new code for each connection. So there is no need to worry about the support person dialing back in and downloading data. Once the session is ended, the code is no longer valid.

So thanks to technology, a happy ending to the story. My sister is happy and everything is working fine with her new laptop and home network. I wonder what the fee would be for a tech. support call from 8000 miles away?

According to the Consumer Electronics Association, attendance at this year’s CES 2009 was down 10%. Feedback from people visiting the show and manning the booths was that it was down more than that. In previous years you could barely walk down the aisles. This year they were wide open. The following is a quick summary of the week.

Biggest Let Down: MacWorld. In previous years, ironically, the buzz at CES was MacWorld and new product announcements. With Steve Jobs a no show and barely any new announcements, it was almost a non-event.

Biggest Surprise: Palm Pre phone. Most people had written Palm off as a phone supplier since the introduction of the iPod. When Palm announced the Pre, their stock went up 35% in one day. Some comments in the blogosphere are that this could actually be competitor to the iPhone. We will have to wait and see.

Everyone has a…Netbook. If you make hardware, you probably launched a Netbook at CES. The most talked about was probably the Sony Vaio P. But there were many others. There were new introductions from the market leader, ASUS and Dell, but even Viewsonic, a monitor maker, launched a Netbook.

Most over used phrase…Normal People. This phrase refers to all the non-techies out there who have a tough time getting their photos on their TV, or configuring a home network, or connecting their media to all of the above. I must have heard this definition at almost every demo. It is a great focus because we all know how hard it is to do all the above, but they have been trying to get there for a long time.

Home Theatre. In previous years it was who had the biggest flat panel. Given the economic times, it seemed appropriate that this was not the focus of HDTV launches this year. It was more about the thinnest, or the technology such as LCD screens moving to 120 and 240 kHz. Also there was more focus on connecting HDTVs to the internet. The other development in this space is Sound Bars. These are replacing the 5 speaker surround sound Home Theatre In a Box (HTIB) with one bar that can be mounted below the TV. It still gives you surround sound, but without the hassle of running cables around the room.

Connected Media. All the network vendors launched storage and media streaming devices… for normal people. Cisco (Linksys), Netgear, Seagate and others all have some kind of devise for home network storage and media sharing. The device that caught my eye and follows the KISS principle was PogoPlug. You simply take a hard drive, put it in the enclosure, plug it into an outlet then plug it into your router. It configures itself and makes the hard drive available to anyone on the network. With the price of hard drivers now below $100 for 1 terabyte of storage this is a great way to increase network storage.

Economy. Lastly, everyone was talking about the economy. Forecasts were showing declines in the single digits for 2009. This doesn’t really fit with the fact that Circuit City will be liquidating 500+ stores and Best Buy had a 70% decline in earnings for the last quarter.

Over the past couple of years there has been a lot of talk about UMPC or Ultra Mobile PC’s. There were lots of prototypes from companies like Intel, but everything was in the future. Then a company called ASUS, or ASUSTek, released their Eee PC in 2007. This was a very small notebook that make the bold step of having Linux as the operating system. At first no one was quite sure what to thinks about it, but over the last year, the Eee PC has taken off. Probably the biggest reason is the retail price is in the $400 range.

The other bold steps made by ASUS was that the Eee PC had no hard disk. You can get one in 4GB, 8GB and now 16GB flash memory. This means no moving parts in the notebook, which leads to more reliability. Lastly, the screen is 7 inches.

In terms of functionality you have all the basics. Wifi, internet browsing, web cam and audio. Accoding to their web site there are over 40 applications pre-installed.

Now why do I ask if ASUS is the next Apple? Over the years I have attended my share of tech. events and became aware of the number of Apple Mac Books vs. other laptops being used by the audience. Recently when I attended the Northern Voice event in Vancouver, another group of notebooks was popping up. This was the Eee PC. It was funny to watch as people pulled out their Eee PC, slowly small crowds began to form. The owners were checking their email, writing blog postings and recording video of speakers. The biggest draw, was the small footprint.

The popularity of these notebooks was further confirmed by third party accessory companies who are now coming out with products for the Eee PC. A-Data has released Eee PC branded flash memory and USB memory stick.

Due to the success of the Eee PC, there are competitors who have their notebooks being released over the next couple of months. Acer, HP and MSI as well as many other lesser known manufacturers are all fighting for their piece of the pie. ASUS is not laying down and letting these others take market share. They are releasing a 9 inch screen version, will now go up to 32 GB of RAM and…will come installed with Microsoft Windows XP.

The market for ultra portables will heat up further in June when Intel releases their Atom processor. This small footprint, high performance processor will be perfect for the ultra portables. ASUS has decided to push out their 9 inch screen in May rather than wait for the Atom processor. Others are a mixed bag. Whether or not this will be a mis-step for ASUS, only time will tell. Right now it is their market share to grow or not.