It’s cool stuff, although I’m a little doubtful about it working well for general web content. It would be a fun experiment, though!

Also in the news today is this New York Times article (via Neatorama) about an automatic “beautification engine” that modifies images to make the people in them look better.

Would that be interesting in browsers? I suppose some people would find in interesting in some cases (*cough*porn*cough*), but it’s a little scary and creepy to think about the kinds of social and psychological effects that would arise from subtly applying such an algorithm everywhere. (Consider a similar vein: automatically rewriting web pages more cheerful. A news article about panic selling on Wall Street suddenly becomes a doubleplus good story about the great weather, buying opportunities, and fluffy kittens!)

A month or two ago this stupid little icon showed up on my menu bar. I found it kind of amusing (in a sad kind of way) because it appeared out of the blue, without my having approved anything, and the dropdown menu had a bunch of redundant items that were all variations of “you are not using MobileMe”.

I noticed today that now it’s complaining about sync conflicts. Which is also kind of sad, because I *still* have never used it, and have no idea what those conflicts could be for (turns out they’re for iCal conflicts… but I don’t use iCal any more). It even *says* that I’ve never used it, and that syncing is disabled!

WTF, Apple?!

The “small world theory,” embodied in the old saw that there are just “six degrees of separation” between any two strangers on Earth, has been largely corroborated by a massive study of electronic communication.

With records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people from around the world, researchers have concluded that any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances.

The database covered all of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network in June 2006 [...]

Gosh, that’s kinda neat. We’re all just… Hey, wait. 30 billion records from 180 million people? Retained for over 2 years? I wonder how many users of Messenger (and other IM services?) are aware of how much data is being logged.

But what I found most stunning was this picture:

That’s a shot of Phoenix dangling under it’s parachute (mid-air, during landing), taken by another spacecraft (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) from orbit. Wow.

Trivia: Something similar was done in 2005, when MGS took pictures of Odyssey and Mars Express. Apparently this is an old spy satellite trick, taking a look at foreign hardware (or your own)… Although one can get nice views from the ground, too.

I hear you’ve had a rough time of it lately. Losing 1.1 million customers and $505 million last quarter? Ouch. I’d really love to help you out. Drop me a line when you have a billing system that will actually take my money! (I believe you already have my number.)

But, as suspected, adding on a Phone-As-Modem (PAM) data plan (to enable internet access from my laptop and N810) was a nightmare. In fact, because — well, I’ll spare you 40 minutes of various excuses from customer service — it ends up being “impossible” to add. So even though my phone supports it, and I’m grudgingly willing to fork over an extra $40/month ($960 for the term of my contract), Sprint’s billing system won’t take my money. Wooooonderful.

I suppose I could look at other cellular providers… But I have little faith that I’ll find better results elsewhere, or be able to do so without a week-long migraine. Perhaps AT&T and the rumored second-coming of the Jesus Phone will provide salvation. I still have concerns about Ma Bell’s less-than-immaculate hands, but this feels more and more like a strategy game… Jump there, hope the rest of the industry moves, and then jump somewhere else.

Oh well. At least for all my troubles I’ll have a slightly better cell phone with a nifty ringer for the next two years.

Installation was painless. I didn’t even need to edit xorg.conf and specify my monitor’s horizontal refresh rate! :-) Video, sound, and networking all worked. I must grumble a little bit, though, that the installer still can’t automagically detect the keyboard type, and instead presents a list with a zillion obscure variants (with a default selected). Maybe it’s just not possible… I remember how installers of yore used to do the same thing for mice (”Serial mouse? Bus Mouse? PS/2 protocol, or Logitech?”, etc.), but that all seems to Just Work now. Selecting my physical location is also slightly annoying; it might be neat to do a GeoIP lookup to guess… Anyway, both just small nitpicks.

One thing I am a little confused about is what (if any?) VMWare stuff needs to be done. In the past, the usual process was to install the guest OS, and then install VMWare Tools to get various things working. Now it seems like the Ubuntu installer has already done some of that… At least, it gave me vmware-specific video and mouse packages. But the desktop doesn’t resize when the VMWare window is resized, and VMWare’s Forums seem to have some arguments going on (hi Al!) in regards to their Tools stuff not working on Hardy and a perceived lack of support. So, I don’t know what’s up with that. Things seem to be working well enough that I’ll just use it as-is for a while, and then check back later when other people figure it out. Or maybe I’ll lazyblog about it, and hope someone comments. :-)

P.S. Love the Heron artwork!

The available phones are still awful — clunky interfaces and useless features. I was watching a video review of one phone, where a main review point was the ability to change the color and font of the numbers shown while dialing. Never mind the crappy MP3 player, here’s 555-1234 in rainbow Comic Sans! At least the consistent worthlessness seems to make shopping easier — why compare features when you can just pick the pretty one and be equally disappointed?

The various service plans are awful too; in particular, the data rates are completely ridiculous. Some plans give you unlimited data with the on-phone browser, but I’d rather get my teeth pulled than do that. I *would* like to be able to use my phone for network connectivity (on my laptop or N800, via bluetooth) now and then, when I’m stuck some place without WiFi . But it appears that the only choices are (1) pay a high monthly fee for unlimited access or (2) pay astronomical per-byte rates. Verizon made me shake my head first: “Data sent or received (incl. Mobile Web advertising) is $1.99/MB.” $2 to load a Tinderbox page (which is about a megabyte), and I have to pay them to send ads to me as well?! Then I saw Sprint’s rates: “Customers without a phone-as-modem plan will be charged 3 cents per kilobyte for Sprint Vision or Sprint Power Vision usage unless a Phone as Modem plan is selected.” $30 to load a Tinderbox page?! WTF? It’s clearly not an issue of constrained resources, as the phone-as-modem plan is $40 a month for unlimited usage.

This kind of racket must be especially profitable, because it seems that “unlimited” doesn’t really mean “unlimited”. If a carrier decides you’re using too much (according to sekret rules they won’t tell you about), apparently they may start charging at per-byte rates (or, if you’re lucky, just cut you off). So, you can pay them $480 a year as a protection fee (to make sure you don’t accidentally end up with a gazillion-dollar monthly bill), and then just hope that they don’t come around and break your kneecaps anyway.

Madness.

["Why not an iPhone?", I hear someone asking... Well: no bluetooth network access, terrible data speed, I don't need a $400 phone, objection to AT&T's complicity in the NSA wiretapping thing, and opposition to the closed nature of the iPhone platform. The last of these (non-openness) I'd be willing to ignore on the principle that the iPhone is much less evil than the alternatives, but the rest are still a deal breaker.]

(YouTube)