I received a memory upgrade for my notebook today – the corporate IT bumped up its memory from 1GB to 4GB.  Yay!  Rebooted and checked my system information to see how much faster I can surf work.

Wow, 3.25 GB of RAM!  Wait… 3.25?  What happened to the other 0.75GB?  Did the operating system hijack it?

Oh no, that wasn’t the reason.  A quick check on the web revealed the answer: we’ve hit the limits of addressable memory space of a 32-bit microprocessor.  Already?  Wasn’t it a mere 16 years ago that the Intel 80386 (my first 32-bit computer) came with 1MB of RAM and a 4GB hard disk.  Although the system had 4GB of RAM, memory addresses were reserved for devices with direct memory access, such as the video card and some peripherals.

There were workarounds such as PAE and such, but the cold truth was that we had to go to a 64-bit architecture to get access to more memory.  Ah, the pace of technological innovation and how far we’ve come since the early days of the PC.

Over the past couple of months, I have been following the relentless rise in energy prices (petrol is now $3.50/gallon). Seeking the cause of this, I unearthed some troubling news which is an epiphany of sorts.

“Peak oil” – a term used by some geologist who foresee the imminent peaking of world oil production. A good reference is the Hirsch Report. The report forecasts that geological constraints will result in falling oil production as most of the major oil fields are past their peak production lives.

Given that the past three generations have grown up in a world of increasing mechanization driven by the availability of cheap fuel, the peak oil seems like the end of a golden era. Oil is probably the most convenient form of energy that makes possible modern transportation – especially automobiles and air travel. It also drives the wheels of industry allowing for mining of minerals and agriculture on a scale unprecedented before in human history. But the earth’s largesse is now reached its limits – what will this mean for the future?

While noone can predict how fast the supply of oil will be reduced, or what it’s exact effects will be, any rational analysis will conclude that the effects cannot be rosy. The worst case scenarios include a total breakdown of civilization and a return to pre-Industrial society. Optimists might hope for technological advances that will yield efficiencies and allow us to retain a semblance of modern life.

In the past year, since Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, the attention of the media has been fixated on Global Warming. What is likely is the reality of reduced oil production will likely force a reduction in carbon emissions anyway, and that the impact of that happening will hit us far sooner than rising ocean levels or climate changes. I am fearful that in the next ten years, oil prices will increase ten-fold. Air travel will be hard hit and other fuel-intensive sectors of the economy slow down.

What can I do? Well, some events are likely to happen. Higher inflation, as the cost of goods are pushed up by rising fuel prices. Commodity and energy prices will rise driven by shorter supplies and inelastic demand. Renewables can only meet a fraction of our current needs, and even then the generation of wind turbines and solar panels require a technological infrastructure that itself will be heavily strained.

This is a life-changing realization that I must act now to protect my family and our future. Nothing like this has ever happened before and I can’t believe how few people are aware of this impact.

In preparation for the baby, I purchased a Canon Elura 100 camcorder from Amazon last week.

I struggled with this decision to figure out whether I’d really want to deal with the hassle of using and editing home videos. I already have my hands full with regular photography, which keeps my busy with editing and posting photos on my website. Would I be better off with another media form? Doing good home video was a completely new skill which demands a lot more expertise and time which I am continually short of.

What convinced me finally was the price of these gadgets and the opportunity to get some video footage – a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The cost of the Canon Elura was mere US$320 – a real bargain. The equivalent model in Singapore is the MVx460, with a RRP of S$1200. After currency conversion, I paid about half the price for this unit! Nothing like a good bargain to give a warm fuzzy feeling about a purchase.

Last night, I tested this out at AM’s farewell party. I managed to get enough footage for a decent 5-minute clip of the party. Microsoft’s Movie Makerwas a simple tool that allowed me to edit and produce a decent video clip with transition effects and labels. And I’m now uploading it to Google’s Video site – should be available for download in a few days I hope.

At last, a folder (or directory) synchronization tool that works! My contention is that simplest way to back up data to a secondary storage location is using a folder synchronization tool. A simple copy is often unsuitable for daily backups because of the sheer volume of data (my work and personal folders total about a gigabyte each). With folder synchronization only files that have been modified are moved between the different locations.

Another reason was that I sometimes used my portable hard disk to move data between the office and home (and doubling as a backup). It saved me lugging the notebook between office and home, especially if I already have a computer at home.

For a couple of years, I’ve been synchronizing folders using unison (and before that, BASK – I think that’s now defunct). Unison was great, but remained a command line tool and sacrificed performance and stability for cross-platform compatibility. It worked well enough but when mismatches occurred, resolving these was a careful painstaking task (I once synchronized files the wrong direction!)

There are more expensive tools, such as FolderMatch, but I wasn’t prepared to pay for what was a seeminly simple task. These provided a GUI that allowed manual comparisons to be performed quickly.

While it may seem simple task, problems appear when one tries to modify data on the removable disk and then you have conflicts that can only be resolved if the tool keeps track of which file was actually modified (a simple timestamp compare isn’t sufficient because it doesn’t provide a baseline). And an even more complex task was deleting files – if I removed a file from one source, it should be removed from the destination as well.

Now, Microsoft has stepped in by providing a Powertoy for Windows XP called SyncToy. It’s a simple tool that performs synchronization of two destinations. It’s simple and fast, allowing for several means of synchronization:

• synchronize – data is sync’ed both ways
• echo – data is pushed from source to destination
• subscribe – data is retrieved to source from destination
• and a couple of other variants of echo and subscribe

Because it dispenses with cross platform issues (unlike unison), it runs extremely fast on Windows XP. What used to be a 2 min backup can now be completed in under 20 seconds – this is for folders with several thousand files. Excellent!

Free phone calls over the Internet! Yes, you’ve heard this before. With Skype, we now have great voice quality over the Internet, almost equal to those of traditional phone lines.

However, Voice-Over-IP companies continue to set new expectations. The latest is VOIPBuster, which promises free calls from the Internet to land lines in over 15 countries, including the US, UK and many European countries. The only catch is that one has to purchase 5 Euros in credit first.

This programme is still in beta, but so far, I’ve logged about 60 minutes of calls to my colleagues in California without charging a cent. The quality is pretty good and the lag is nearly imperceptible. Comparable to a cellphone connection.

After a month of usage, I have an update to my previous evaluation of this mobile phone. I have since gotten used to the new interface, and have overcome some of my Nokia habits. Still, the handphone operation does fall short in some ways.

• No Immediate Shortcut to writing an SMS. The closest shortcut brings the user to a choice of starting a text or multimedia message. Given that I do 100% of my messaging in text, it makes me do one extra click to start writing my message.
• Contact search by first letter of name. This is a pain because I have 400 contacts, and often with 20-30 contacts starting with the same alphabet. This means I can’t locate a specific name except by scrolling through the list.
• No call/hangup icons on the phone. This phone is totally menu-driven, and dispensed with the traditional green and red icons for starting/ending a call. Now, that’s convergence gone too far – this item is first and foremost still a telephone. I shouldn’t have to look at the screen to find out how to take a call.
• Call history doesn’t indicate length of call. Minor issue – the history list shows when the call was placed, but no indication of how long.

Well, maybe somebody can tell me if I’m wrong about these usability issues. To me, it’s irritating, but not unbearably so.

Today, I made a dumb boo-boo with my Windows notebook. I was locked out without an administrator password – how dumb is that?

I was preparing for some demos and was frustrated by some of the bugs that I had hit. The bad thing was that the server and engineers were located in Singapore, and I suspected that my machine name was getting cached in the server and not allowing my operations to be processed. So I tried to change my machine name.

In my corporate environment, all notebooks are part of an NT domain. This meant that if my machine wanted to rejoin as as different ID, I needed administrative rights. And with a company meeting going on at the same time, I didn’t want to wait in queue for IT to help me out. So I dropped out of the domain, hoping that I could restore my partition image this weekend to rejoin the domain.

When I restarted, OOPS! – I forgot the local Administrator password. And since my machine was no longer part of the network, I couldn’t log in with my domain password. The Linux boot disks I had only granted me read-only access to NTFS drives, and none hinted at being able to reset Administrator password.

I took it down to IT, where they attempted to use the preinstalled Administrator password to log in (which I had disabled to avoid unauthorized access to my notebook). Too bad. Then they tried ERD Commander – a utility by Winternals that helped administrators reset lost password. And hey, that didn’t work too! Somehow my system was locked down and the utility couldn’t access my registry.

Now I started getting worried. My demo was at 4pm in the afternoon, and it was then 11 pm.

I pulled out my Norton Ghost image and asked IT to reimage the boot partition. I’m fortunate that I just made the image last week, so it was relatively up-to-date. It took about 30 minutes to restore the image. And everything fell back in order….

What a relief. The demo was postponed (that’s another story), but at least I was able to carry on working. And because I kept most of my work data on another partition, the reimaging didn’t affect any of my work or email. Amazing!

Lesson of the today: always keep your data in another drive.

After many years of using mobile phones, I’ve not found much impetus to purchase new handsets in the recent five years or so. Colour screens didn’t do very much for me, nor did the ability to take low resolution photos, or to have a bulky PDA combo.

But last week, I found the new K750i on the shelves of mobile phone stores in Singapore, and I was hooked. It boast so much functionality in a handset not much larger than my current Nokia 7210:

• 2 megapixel camera – always handy when my Canon EOS 300D can’t fit into my pocket.
• MP3 music player (including MP3 ringtones).
• Removable storage (even if it only uses Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick Pro Duo), with a supplied 64MB card.
• Integration with Outlook contacts with a supplied USB cable (the previous Nokia’s IR connection didn’t work and a separate USB connector costs as much as $20)

Of course, there are much more features but those were the ones that did it for me. Quite unexpectedly, it also supported MPEG4 video playback (need to check if it supports XVid) and has a couple of LED lights that acts as a torch. The Bluetooth support is welcome although those accessories are still far too expensive for my taste ($200+ for a stereo headphones). Oh, and it supports digital radio (RDS) and POP3/IMAP email – excellent!

All for a neat package costing S$680. I’ve had it for two days now, and I’ve overcome most of the usability differences. Notably, the space and symbol keys are positioned differently in a Nokia keypad, but it’s not difficult to overcome. Also, my meetings that were scheduled in a different time zone appeared in the calendar in the wrong day.

I’ve actually stopped tracking mobile phone features since my Nokia 8210 phone five years ago – then, phones were still getting smaller and lighter. Today, manufacturers are packing more features into the handsets, since phones simply can’t get much smaller.

OK, my newest toy should keep me happy for a few months.

Just found out today that McDonalds outlets in Singapore offer free wireless broadband connections. It merely asks for your name and email address as the price for admission. I was at the McDonalds at Tampines bus interchange. Use the SSID “skynetglobal”.

I had previously believed that most “hot spots” were only available commercially, but it certainly seems as if there are some free ones left.

Oh, in a related episode, my Epson 925 printer stopped working. The blinking red light and a “General error” message indicated that it was in need of servicing. Another bargain basement printer worth barely more than the price of the ink cartridge it holds inside… Well, it was good while it lasted… What do I do with the Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper now? Any takers? I have one 4-inch roll and several A4 sized sheets.

It was a matter of time before they caved. Yahoo! started using redirects with their search results a couple of years ago, and today I noticed that Google had done the same. Previously, Google results was a hyperlink direct to the destination site. Today, the URLs lead to a Google redirect script that tracks which result was clicked.

It is an attractive proposition – they more they know about user behaviour (i.e. which URLs are followed), the better they can optimize the search engine and fine tune the results. More data is better than less.

Well, whats the down side? One, performance – every click brings you to Google’s website before leading you to the final destination. Second – Google already places cookies in your browser, and these can potentially be used to capture user behaviour – why wouldn’t they customize your future searches based on your past behaviour? Well, that’s another chunk of privacy down the drain.

I’m a little disappointed, perhaps believing that Google still stood for higher principles than those of its competitors.