Cubegeek

iPad2: The Cubegeek Review

The iPad2 is what I've got, and it is just as good, and better than I expected. 

The first thing I notice is that I am now essentially complete in my Mac transformation. I've got the MacBook Pro, AppleTV, the latest iPhone and iPad. It all started a couple years ago when my daughter asked me what would I do if I could do anything I wanted. My answer was that I would build Batcaves. Attending to that, I wondered what kind of machines people who can afford any machine have, and the answer was the full blown Mac Pro. I checked it out, it made sense. So I have converted with two important reservations.

The first reservation is that nobody outside of the cloud is safe. The second reservation is that the cloud is not built of Mac stuff. The implications are simple. You must leverage cloud technology; you must understand cloud technology. It is the infrastructure of the future, period. But for clients, you cannot beat the Mac, not with anything.

While I'm flinging poo, I know that there are people who desire to jailbreak their phones and run Alienware boxen with custom stuff. That's fine. Those are matters for people who build their own tools. I recognize the attraction - there are people who also like to design their own computer languages. I'm not one of those people. Of all the computer languages and tools that have been since Turing Year Zero, the Mac is the most evolved and its OSs are pretty much everything they need to be. Everything else that's better is kit - like the clutches on the McLaren Mercedes F1 car driven by Lewis Hamilton.

To the iPad.

What I just heard Leo Laporte say foreshadowing what Woz himself said is that the iPad is what Apple Inc was built to realize. Every other computing device up to this moment in time was just a stepping stone, and this finally is the platform. It is only after you have used it that such matters become transparently clear. I no longer have much desire to consume information at my desktop. Both my desktop and my phone are being transformed by the iPad.

The iPad2 is fast. There has never been a moment when I thought that it was underpowered or slow. A couple apps have crapped out, but when I go to an app, it feels like a righteously fast computer, not some approximation of one. It stands on its own and competes head to head with apps on all platforms, and that is the stunning thing about the iPad2. This is why it ushers in a new era of computing.

The first thing that surprised me is how my iPhone now seems overburdened. I sense that I have too many apps on it, many of which I simply do not use. There are several I have simply deleted knowing that I don't want them on the small screen. The old iPad seemed like a big iPhone. The iPad2 makes the iphone seem too small. My iPhone is becoming more of just a phone - and if Apple is as smart as I think they are, then they will come to understand how the iPhone needs to become more of a wallet. 

My MacBook Pro is now more for work and less for play. I am almost completely happy to leave it at home. It is becoming my docking station. That would be my Mac if I had one, but that's for Christmas. 

There are several killer apps for the iPad and the first one is Flipboard. It is the most exciting aggregator ever standing in line and inheriting the legacy that was Pointcast, then myYahoo, then iGoogle. Flipboard is everything I need to know in a great format, and when and if they add more styles it will be greater still. 

The second killer app is Mail. The interface for iPad mail has taken over everything for me. Now I use Sparrow on my MacBook because Sparrow is just like Mail on the iPad. It's simple, fast, clean, and bright. It gives mail just the right amount of attention. 

The third killer app is its function as a reader. I like Kindle books best because my library is there on Amazon, but iBooks is for all of my PDFs and I have Google Books too. The iPad2 is a very good reader but it is not a Kindle killer - that is because the Kindle is cheap. It turns out that I bought the Kindle too soon. The Kindle has no business going upmarket to compete with the cheapest iPad. Amazon is smart, smart smart. I'm keeping my Kindle for trips to the beach.

As I've been saying, the iPad changes the way I consume information and the Apple ecosystem is flexible enough to have just the proper amount of overlap. I use AirPlay to push my video and music consumables over to the big Samsung in my living room. But I'm really looking forward to how Apple will manage the cloud. As it stands, I'm using the Amazon locker for music and I will continue to, but I'm using Dropbox more. Apple's behind on this and they need to do it right. Since I consume so much information - enough in fact so that I'm really starting to worry about myself - the transformation that the iPad makes on my habits is significant.

The first thing the iPad does for a geek like me is that it becomes the book that I used to read on the bus and the subway and in the back seat of the car and at lunch by myself. Now that I'm with Amazon, it's every book I need. It was my Bible on Easter Sunday. But since it's an iPad, it's also my nicest book - the one I don't want to take to the beach or on a hiking trip. It is perfect for indoors and especially comfy indoors. Starbucks. Airport. Hotel Lobby. Doctor's Office. Perfect. It's the book, the magazine, the newspaper, the email, the map. 

The second disruption iPad provides is that it becomes really easy to share information person to person. When we're trying to remember the name of that other Will Farell movie or that Phoebe Snow song, it's so much better to pull up the video and share it on the iPad than on the iPhone. I'm much more likely to just hand it over to someone than I am willing to hand over my phone. My phone is private. My iPad less private. 

The third disruption is somewhat unexpected. I decided to get the 32GB with 3G. But I thought about getting the larger one with Wifi only and buying a Mifi to go along. I'm surprised to find that I am using nowhere near the 32GB, and I probably won't, and that I use the 3G less than I expected. I love the fact that there is no 3G contract, so I buy bandwidth on demand, but I know I'm not going to be streaming Netflix. If I want the movie that bad, I can get to a Wifi or own the DVD. Movies are not a big app for me. Video podcasts a little more. But I am glad to have gotten the 3G for the flexibility and for saving money by not buying the 64GB version. This is a big deal because I thought long and hard about all of the options and ways I could get around buying the 3G and extending my Wifi presence, including the new tethering option for the iPhone. Having the 3G is just usefully convenient - and I pretty much use it for maps reading my RSS, which is fairly lightweight.

I'm not going for the games on iPad. I'm staying away from Angry Birds and all tha, but I do crosswords , sudoku and chess every once in a while. There's probably a killer game app that I'll fall for - something like Limbo would work very well. 

It took me two days to get used to typing on the iPad. It's better than the iPhone but nowhere near as good as a keyboard. I will not tote a keyboard around - it defeats the purpose. I'd sooner lug a MacBook Air, yuk. When I need to compose, any old computer and Google Docs will suffice. Speaking of keyboards, I am now pretty much hooked to the Apple chicklets. I replaced the Logitech on my KVM a couple weeks ago. But I don't think I'll ever leave the standard two button mousewheel laser mouse. Sorry Apple. Still, typing on the iPad has a very short learning curve. 

Composing music however has got my attention again. It is the iPad that's got me using Garage Band again, but that's just a start. The kids, when they don't have homework, have rediscovered Garage Band, just to do their own voices in three part harmony. It's the bomb. 

Another thing that's clear is the market for tiny laptops will dry up and blow away. When I got FIOS two summers ago, my rebate for buying the big package was an HP netbook. We nicknamed it PeeWee. Peewee is basically good for email, and the kids use it for typing Google Docs. That's about it. Maybe a little websurfing. but not for Office, not for games, not for downloading pictures. We tried to make it a Boxee server and stick it under the TV. FAIL. PeeWee is for friends who come over, or maybe a YouTube. But PeeWee doesn't do serious work. It's that little luxury sitting on the coffee table whose battery we forget to charge.

The iPad2 is an attention sink. It doesn't do a good job of sitting quietly by itself. Even when I have it in screen saver mode propped up next to my desk, I have to put it on the slowest setting so that when the pictures change it doesn't grab my attention. Insomniac that I am, I cannot fall asleep to it playing a video on the nightstand. I have to turn the screen face down so I don't look. 

I purchased the smart cover for the iPad. I took a long time figuring out if I wanted grey or black leather. I stuck with the grey and am pleased with that decision, because even though it's great it its function, I feel like I should be carrying the iPad around in something thicker and leathery like a folio. I haven't bothered to purchase a stylus for the many writing apps I want to try out, so I think I'll be sticking with Moleskine style notebooks for a while. So in the meantime I want something leathery. When you're walking around with the iPad, the alumnium back seems like something you don't want to scratch, and you sure as hell don't want to drop the entire thing. Still, I think I'll be shopping around for the right skin for this puppy for a while. 

On the whole, I am very pleased with my iPad2 in a way I haven't been about anything I've spent 800 bucks on. Even though in many ways it is like an expensive watch, signifying my yuppy station, hmm, I'm not so young any longer am I, OK upscale station in life, it is also transformative, practical and fun. It is probably my favorite computer ever. You really should get one, if only to watch your babies play with it.

 

Structured Data Farming & The English Village

One of the great draws to me of working in the new industrialized IT, aka the Cloud, is the real possibility it gives for a disruptive change in the way we live and organize ourselves. A thing that has been awfully difficult for me is the extent to which some fraction of my skills are always sitting on the bench depending upon the IT infrastructure of my next client. It might be 6 or it might be 18 months between projects when I get to use my Perl skills, which of course atrophy in the meantime. Between product cycles of one application or another, there will be a host of shortcuts I will have to discover on my own.

But I am taking the approach of a farmer here. As I look forward to this new industry, I want to settle in my own version of the English village and cultivate rows of code agriculture. It is an appropriate analogy for the management of structured data. I too will have my various almanacs and real-time cohorts by my virtual side, especially in collaborative projects somewhere along the data supply chain as I provide one piece of specialization using products from my supplier and passing it on to my customer. In the case of my OLAP engine experience, I work with an ETL guy and pass on to a report writing guy, and sometimes I do a little of both.

Information economies will be the enablers of the future. Ties to communities that are dispersed geographically, tied every once in a while to meetups, and in sporadic ad hoc communications over subjects of interest are going to become the organizing paradigms for the next generation here in the US and the first world. I grow more confident as the years go by that people who engineer networks of knowledge are going to have more say in society than ever. It was my reading of Cryptonomicon many years ago that got me thinking that this could be more than dormroom talk for CS wonks, and my recent studies of geopolitics and intelligence confirms it in different ways.

Most interestingly and somewhat tangential to the nuts and bolts of the 'outsourced IT worker' is the extent to which knowledge frameworks themselves will become more important, by that I mean philosophy, theology, and related disciplines. Why? Because I am convinced that in a relatively short space of years we will have analytic networks that will make short work of the sort of dissonant information gaps between those who could know and those who do know. In other words, we'll have the facts so fast and so transparently that the only really interesting thing left to do with them is interpret them according to our philosophical frameworks. And those are going to be the things we will start to organize next.

What will be the most difficult part of that, naturally, will be what I often hear in various corporate cultures called 'socialization'. That is to say the political work required to get things through thick or disinterested skulls. Today, various bureaucratic inefficiencies allow us the luxury of being stupid, indifferent and otherwise out of the loop. The future will not allow that because so much more will be identified and disseminated. We will have knowledge shock. Imagine a world in which everybody's salary becomes public knowledge. That kind of shock of facts will force us to acknowledge things about others and about ourselves that we previously could not make judgments about, and what's going to be even more frustrating is that we will know the extent to which we care about what we can know will or will not matter. This is another reason why our meta-organizations, our philosophical frameworks, our religions, our politics, our circles of trust, our social networks will be so much more important than they are today. They will be our virtual English villages.

I think that I would very much like to live in a literal physical English village, so long as it had delivery of Thai food or maybe a WalMart within 30 minutes. I very much like the idea of being virtually close but physically remote. When people can be so intimate with my facts and information because of the online world, whose industrical cultivation is fast approaching, I think I'd like a lot of physical space between me and the millions. I think of the English village as that remote from where I sit at this moment in Southern California, but how remote is it actually from infrastructural logistics ? That's the measurement of the ideal distance.

On the other hand from data and knowledge farmers are hunters and gatherers. Think of Bear Grylls or the guys who drive the Google camera cars. Think of a new generation of digital paparazzi with their uber digital vacuum cleaners stringing home terabits of raw data from around the planet. Just look at your teenaged kids. What kind of digital dirt will they be tracking into your house? This is how I'm thinking about the future of the supply chain of the digital economy.

Radioactive Fish

"..and then he looked right through me as if I wasn't there."
-- Killing Me Softly

My research is incomplete, but I'm not convinced that there is a such thing as radioactive fish. Let me tell you why.

Ionizing radiation does not work like a poison, it doesn't stay. It is actually kinetic energy of electromagnetic particles. The best way to think of how radiation kills you is to think of a million tiny water needles running through your body over a period of exposure. They are so small that you don't feel them, but they leave a trail of dead cells in their wake. Depending on what cells they hit, they do different kinds of damage. In red blood cells they do lots of damage, they just bounce off of bones. Once these 'water needles' run out of their kinetic energy, they disappear, or melt away like water. The point is that they don't leave any trace of themselves behind, that is, if they are the tiny ones like electrons or gamma rays.

Neutron radiation is different. Neutrons are big enough to knock atoms out of balance and kick out another neutron and destabilize them. Neutron radiation is the key to why nuclear power works. One neutron hits another neutron sometimes with enough energy to kick out some electrons and more than one neutron. In elements like Uranium where there are big huge numbers of neutrons, you could create a chain reaction. That's all nuclear fission is, like a bowling ally infinite loop that creates bowling balls. Collisions and collisions.

How long can an unstable atom spit out more neutrons and energy? That's it's half life and it depends on the atom. It's like certain atoms carry a grudge if they get hit by a neutron. They have long half lives. Cesium is like that. Iodine is like that. Obviously Uranium is like that. Water, on the other hand is not like that. In the first place, it doesn't have a lot of neutrons. That's why when the Japanese nuke plants got out of hand, they doped the water with Boron. Boron is neutron greedy and it doesn't get unstable. But normally neutrons don't do much to water. 

Something that is irradiated doesn't necessarily become radioactive itself. It depends on if it gets hit by neutrons or not, and then if it does get hit by neutrons is it the stuff that carries a neutron grudge.  And this is where you have to make the distinction when it comes to fish. So far as I know fish are made of materials whose atoms don't have long half-lives. I mean if they did, how could the fish live?

In a nuclear reactor, the worrisome part are heavy elements that are radioactive. In Japan, some of these heavier elements which I believe to have been present in the feul cores escaped after the explosions. What is not clear to me is how the reactor containments have not been breached (as I keep hearing) and yet these more heavy elements escaped. Some logical clarity and less dumbed down reporting would be helpful. At any rate, it's suff like that, carried away in particulate matter (smoke) that lands on fruits and vegetables that cause the radioactivity 'of' food. It's not the radiation, it's the contamination by heavy radioactive material. In other words, toxic waste.

So we get more to the question of fish, and in particular the role of seawater in this ecology. The engineers generally use and reuse purified water to cool the reactor core and drive the turbines. That's a closed loop system for the most part, but still, the water does not stay radioactive even though it is exposed to neutron activation. The half life of water is about 7 days, and as far as I can tell it doesn't get very radioactive. Perhaps not at all. But the thing is that for the emergency, the engineers have used seawater to cool the reactors. To the extent that seawater contains various salts and trace elements with longer half-lives than water itself, this is the 'poison'. Sulfur, for example has a half life of 88 days. But in average seawater, sulfur is about .091%. Magnesium, on the other hand has a half life about 10 minutes, but there's more magnesium in seawater than sulfur. .129% So now you're beginning to see the start of a math problem.

If you have 10,000 tons of seawater exposed to x amount of neutron radiation (as a fraction of the total ionizing radiation given off by the nuclear core) what fraction of that will be absorbed by the trace salts in that seawater when dumped into the ocean? And by dumped into the ocean that means 10,000 tons of seawater in an area roughly the size of the region fished for your sushi flavor of choice. I can't imagine that a generic fishing boat is going to be within 10 miles of shore, and 10 miles of ocean can contain how many tons of water? So then you have that whole dispersal question and how many drops carry out into the fisheries. So you have some fraction of radioactive mineral salts and their half-lives to account for and guess how much of that gets into fish...

You should clearly see that even when the seawater pumped out of Fukishima is seven million times what it 'should' be, there are a lot of factors dispersing that radioactivity, including the fact that radioactive material itself degrades.

On the whole as a class of environmental disaster, this is, in my view, two orders of magnitude smaller than the blown oilwell from last year in the Gulf of Mexico. It's the radioactive smoke from an explosion, not largely contaminated seawater that's the problem, and the cesium and iodine on the fruits and veggies (particularly spinach) is the most dangerous stuff, not the seawater.

So eat your fish.