Headworx

So the Apple Tablet (iPad?) announcement is scheduled in four weeks. It probably won't hit the stores for another five months, as it was the case with the iPhone. As any wireless device it has to pass FCC tests, so there will not be a point to keep it secret anymore by Apple. The world is waiting. Joining the speculating crowd, let me try to share my thoughts of what it will be like. Looking back, especially at the iPhone announcement, we may be certain Apple is trying to address everything we do not like or do not feel comfortable with when using portable Internet devices. Size. We may be sure it will be as thin as possible. I would say the thickness will be similar to the iPod Touch (thinner than iPhone). Hight / width probably twice the iPhone. And the screen will fill the entire surface. Display. Everyone agrees OLED is very probable. The iPad does not have to compete on price. And OLED is the cutting edge today. The screen resolution is probably 720p (1280x720) and I think it ...

I mentioned the Sheeva Plug computer several times here on this blog. Today I start a series of posts that will continue on the tech.slupik.com , devoted to Sheeva development, and to plug computers and other embedded systems in general. But let me post the inaugural story in both places. At the moment I run two Sheeva servers in my little data center. I have the third one set up as a development / staging environment. There are many ideas continuously coming to my mind. Most of them require testing various scenarios and it would simply be inconvenient to mess with the production machines. That is why I purchased the third one. hey, at $99 it is not a life changing decision. When the third Plug arrived, I thought to myself it would be nice to have a permanent environment in place to play with it. Environment here means a host machine, needed to prepare the Sheeva to run and then a simple I/O for screen and keyboard and a web browser. The hardware requirements for such a machine are pr...

2010 is approaching us fast. 2000 seems like yesterday. The other day I was thinking about all these technology achievements of the last 10 years. And really there is not much, we, as a civilization, should be really proud of. Especially compared to the 90's. Between 1990 and 2000 we have essentially invented the Internet. 32-bit Windows and Linux operating systems were born. GSM mobile telephony conquered the world. MP3 players arrived. Digital photography too. I could go on and on adding to the list of technology achievements from the decade before. So what about the current decade? Social networking you may say. I cannot argue the fact the number of users of Facebook closes to half a billion. 100 million of them play Farmville. But is there really value there? Quality? I mean value that moves us as human beings to the next level. In 1990s there was the Pulp Fiction. Today we seem to have pulp reality. In the 80's we used to write letters. Not often, but very personal. Then c...

Being an absolute fan of wireless connectivity, the truth is I run most of my important network services at home over the wired Ethernet. Surely I have wired DSL connection. Theoretically 3.5G HSPA should be at least as fast as my 1 Mbps fixed line. In bulk asynchronous file transfers - probably it is comparable, but the latency of plain old DSL is an order of magnitude less. And latency matters when using synchronous protocols. My wireless LAN is 802.11g. I tried a number of 802.11n setups, but the interoperability and stability was simply unacceptable. Actually of all 802.11n access points I tried, only the Apple Airport was successfully connecting to my Lenovo X200s. And even the Airport was temporarily interrupting the transmission of big data chunks. For usual Web activities the LAN speed usually does not matter. Even the 802.11g is at least 10 times faster than most DSL lines. But along Web browsing we use more and more multimedia over LAN. Most of you are probably familiar with ...