Early Adopters

So, there's no mad rush of early adopters for stereoscopic (aka 3D) TVs. Hardly surprising as there is almost no content, the glasses are very expensive, and the viewing experience is not very comfortable. There was a time when companies could count on the early adopters for initial sales of new products, but you still have to give them a reason to buy. Not to mention that glasses-free stereoscopic TVs are just around the corner, but even those have problems as the viewer position is still important.

The average consumer will decide in the end whether stereoscopic TVs are a gimmick worth buying. I've already decided it's not.

The Laser

50 years ago the first working laser was developed and the military have been of dreaming of laser weapons ever since. While most of the experimental weapons have been duds, and even though there have been some interesting successes like the THEL, they are still a very long way from a battle field ready blaster. And when the generals do eventually get their practical laser weapons, I'm sure someone will want to attached them to some sharks. ^_^

Sci-Fi And Technology

This article discusses the feedback between sci-fi and computer technology. The connection between near future sci-fi and computers actually seems valid, but in other areas of technology, not so much. Most sci-fi about space travel has been way off, for example. And this is only interplanetary, not interstellar travel that I'm talking about!

Look at 2001: A Space Odyssey. Large permanent space stations orbit the earth. Travel to and from the stations is routine. There is a fairly realistic long term deep space mission to Jupiter using a ship specially build for the project. Compare that to the proposed Mars mission which, even if it does happen, will be 30 years later and probably be less technologically advanced. The computer might be right though. ^_^

Of course the difference in complexity between computer technology and space travel is huge. But there is another more subtle difference. Computer technology is created by private companies that are motivated by profit. Space technology is still largely funded by governments motivated by... what? That is changing of course, but those private companies involved in space tech are still very young, and in some cases are using 60 year old technology.

GTalk And Protocol Transports

My preferred IM system is Jabber and the open XMPP standard so I was very happy when Google choose XMPP as the platform for the GTalk service. But what about the all the other IM services? There are several solutions. The simplest is to run separate clients for each service. This works best on Windows where you can use the official clients but on Linux official clients are not always available. On Linux, there are a few multi-protocol clients and many people prefer that solution. I prefer to use a XMPP only client with a protocol transport on a remote server.

XMPP protocol transports are proxies which translate the between XMPP and the proprietary protocol. It works well most of the time. There are two big problems with it. You have to find a reliable transport server and your jabber service has to talk to the server properly. For a long time now xmpp.net2max.com in Australia and GTalk have worked perfectly for me. Until a couple of days ago, that is.

First problem is net2max.com appear to have closed the server to non-members. That's disappointing since it was very reliable but the choice is understandable. When I tried other transport servers, I found that GTalk no longer talks to any of them properly. When I connect to the protocol server via my account at jabber.org, everything works perfectly, so the failure is definitely GTalk. Its a free service so I can't really complain, but it is annoying. Bug reports have been filed so we just have to wait for a fix.

SSL Certificates

Firefox 3's policy on self-signed SSL certificates is very annoying. I understand why they did it but sometimes all we really want is the encryption and a self-signed certificate is fine. I was asked if there was a work-a-round and the answer is no. You can always add an exception for the certificate but for average non-technical users, it is a lot of extra work. The best answer is to get a certificate issued by a Certificate Authority (CA) but if you only operate a small site, you cannot justify the cost.

Until now I knew of one free CA, cacert.org, but none of the browsers recognise them so it does help with this problem. I just visited their site and it looks like they are working hard to get themselves included in the mainstream browsers. While researching this problem I found startssl.com. They also provide free certificates and Firefox recognises them as a CA, so it looks like a good solution. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer does not, but it is lot easier to manually accept certificates in IE (or so I've been told, I haven't use IE in a long time). If remember correctly, it was easier in FF2 as well. Oh well, that's progress for you.

CouchDB

This month's TLUG meeting had a talk on CouchDB, a free form database system that you access via HTTP. Your database query is an URL. We have entered a strange time where technologies traditionally used for web development, are being used outside the browser. Most of it seems to be flavour-of-the-day and anything you use in a project could be obsolete in a few months. One would hope that the better technologies would have some longevity, but I'm not really seeing that happening. CouchDB uses HTTP which was created 20-odd years ago. Will CouchDB be around in 20 years? I am doubtful.