The first round of the Finnish presidential election is over. I happened to surf the Finnish news sites through Google translate (don’t ask). The results resemble some sort of machine-generated mildly dadaistic art.

First, let’s look at the results. Spongebobs did quite well, although didn’t make it to the second round. Spongebob V�yrynen to, is a veteran politician and had attempted to reach presidency before. He did great work but in the end lost, albeit with quite a narrow margin, to Mr. Haavisto,.

Click the images to enlarge them.

Spongebobs in the Finnish presidential elections

There were two female candidates, both of whom did not gather a lot of votes. The female candidates were thus equally balanced, you wooden spoon!

So how did the happy victor of the first round celebrate? He went to meet his campaign people, who got all excited and chanted the wrong names:

Sauli, Boris, Boris

None of that stuff is in the original text. The Finnish name for Spongebob Squarepants is Paavo Pesusieni, so Google Translate helpfully makes all Paavos become Spongebobs. The “wooden spoon” – I’ve no idea where that comes from. Likewise for the Boris, Boris part. It’s not in the original text. In the original text it says how the crowd chanted “Sauli, Sauli, Sauli” – perhaps Boris is the equivalent name to Sauli? One can only guess.

Stay tuned for round 2 of the election.

Update: fixed thumbnail SSL image links to non-SSL.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge, UK, recently demonstrated printing (transparent AND flexible) graphene-based thin-film transistors with a modified ink jet printer. (“Ink-Jet Printed Graphene Electronics” at arXiv)

So what does this mean? In the future, you can download a chip design from the Internet, modify it as required, and fabricate it in your garage with a kind of an inkjet. You can essentially build an entire system by printing the sheets and then combining them with suitable cables and connectors. Maybe the result won’t beat an Intel Core i7 in speed, but it will be a treasure trove for hobbyists and professionals worldwide – think today’s Arduino-hacking innovators supercharged.

Longer term effects: production and innovation in computing technology manufacturing moving one step below from corporate labs and fabrication plants to homes and hackerspaces. This translates to faster turnaround times: no need to build elaborate marketing campaigns and align release times with Christmas sales, building even 2 prototype chips is feasible, the whole world’s experts are available, and so on. (Having free and open (as in speech and beer) hardware will be a major factor in this development – one could close the hardware off but the development convenience would suffer and speed would slow down as a result.) The application areas will also move beyond just “cool, I just printed a tiny logic circuit” to “cool, I just printed an ARM core” and beyond. Once this speed of innovation is applied to neighbouring areas such as wireless communications technologies, then we will truly see some interesting developments.

Will this destroy massive corporate R&D projects? No, I don’t think so, there won’t be interference until a lot of time passes. It takes expensive and complex equipment to research and develop a memristor, for example. But the speed of remixing existing technology and improving it will increase. Also, the distribution of technology will move beyond the shackles of “the market is just 10k people, forget about it”. As a summary: self-fabbing printed circuits will take care of evolutionary paths, corporate R&D of big revolutions, and meanwhile the long tail will become flatter and longer.

Problem

You’ve upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04, it comes with a kernel newer than 2.6.32; and now booting doesn’t work. Grub runs OK, initrd starts up, kernel boots all right, but early at boot you get a blank screen – or if you enable text boot, the last thing you see is somewhere around the “pci_root PNP0A08:00: host bridge window” lines.

If you examine the kern.log, there’s nothing too obvious, except perhaps this:

pci0000:00: Requesting ACPI _OSC control (0x1d)
Unable to assume _OSC PCIe control. Disabling ASPM

Perhaps you’ll also see a “hda_intel: spurious response 0×0:0×0, last cmd=0x0f0000″ repeated hundreds of times. This causes also a quite audible pop from the DAC when the system gets here – you’ll hear a big “snap!” from the speakers.

Solution

Use the “pcie_aspm=off” kernel parameter when booting.

This turns off PCIe ASPM support.

Become root, edit /etc/default/grub. Append the parameter to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. Then run update-grub2.

After this, ASPM will be always off, but boot is OK, suspend works, audio works, overall the system works just fine like in 2.6.32 kernels. The downsides? Haven’t seen any so far, then again, the laptop is “always” AC powered. Powertop reports about 260 wakeups-from-idle per second as I’m writing this, I’ve not tweaked it. The estimate with battery power hovers around 3h which is well in spec for this laptop.

CPU speed settings are OnDemand for all cores.

PS. The ATI Catalyst driver (fglrx) was used, but I don’t think it makes a difference. I had some problem with Compiz with Radeon (too old Mesa libs probably) so I went for fglrx instead.

PS2. Another route might be to upgrade the BIOS. However, Toshiba (or Insyde or both) currently provides a Windows-only upgrade .exe which can’t run in DOS mode, so no FreeDOS USB/.iso boot tricks work. The .exe won’t really run under Wine, and even if it did, upgrading the BIOS under Wine is somewhat too extreme sports (for me anyway).

A message to Toshiba: please always, always, always provide a BIOS update which can run under DOS, or better yet, Linux. I don’t give a shit if “Toshiba does not support Linux”, you don’t need to support Linux, you just need to stop actively preventing people from supporting Linux themselves. Oh, and thanks for the great laptop, I love it.

Here’s a presentation I made at the 15th Summer School of Telecommunications in 2006. The subject is “Principles of Ubiquitous Computing”.

SSOTC06 Principles of Ubiquitous Computing

In retrospect, there are some notes to be made. Back then when I was reading the available literature and research, there was a kind of concensus that the peer-to-peer model of communication – device-to-device communication without intermediaries – would play a big role, as this would let the device deployments scale without requiring new or existing static network infrastructure. However, the bulk of the ubiquitous computing devices of today (sensors, smart phones, electrical consumption readers, etc.) rely on static communications infrastructure to function.

Also, the “Spam/Big Brother Society” is as relevant a danger as then. As I see it, the danger has merely evolved and is even more extensive today.

Today, more and more information about private individuals are collected with the justification of “with the information, we can show you more relevant advertisements”. The infrastructure of knowing who you are, what you think and who you know is in place to learn what stuff or services we might be currently missing.

At the moment the Spam Society is very benign. However, once this infrastructure and data is in place, it can be hard to remove it or to escape its reach, or to prevent it from transforming into a Big Brother Society. Even if one were to vanish as the target of the data collection today, the previously obtained information would still contain a lot of data that could be misused.

For example, what can happen if a political party with a violent agenda takes power, one way or another? If your profile indicates you have been thinking wrong thoughts, instead of getting advertisements, you would get night-time visitors taking you for a long car ride that culminates in a neck-shot in the woods. Interestingly enough, there is prior art in this kind of horror scenario: the Nazi government used census data which they data mined with IBM’s help to weed out people with Jewish ancestry.

As for the current state of ubiquitous computing devices, the smart phone stands as a lone king. It helps people organize their lives, entertains them, helps them keep connected with others, helps them document their lives with photographs and videos, and so on.

Although not quite as invisible as Weiser envisioned it, for those who have one, the smart phone is always present, ready to serve – and with modern UIs, it tries to not get in the way too much. I’d say at the moment the smart phone is closest to Weiser’s vision of calm technology. Also, over time, the smart phone has gotten only better and I expect this trend to continue.

Generally, a big downside I see with all current smart phones is the level of trust that needs to be placed on the maintainers and owners of the smartphone ecosystem to not abuse the data they collect (the location data, contact data, calendar data, etc.).

For example, Google backs up your WLAN passwords if you enable the Backup My Data option. It’s convenient in case you lose your phone, but do you know who in the end has access to the data and what they do with it? If you disable the option, the data is said to be removed. Fine; now, how will you know this to be true? You can’t know this, there is no way to check, so you just have to have trust. There are technical ways to remove the reliance on trust (e.g. encrypt the backup locally with a user-given key and then upload it), but at the moment such techniques are not used.

That said, I am a happy user of an Android smart phone. Android is open enough and the phone hardware it runs on is documented enough to let a community of enthusiasts make their own aftermarket firmware. Therefore, if I ever become unhappy with the stock Android, I can always install Cyanogenmod.

In GVim I’ve got Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, 9 point, with antialiasing. I’ve found it to be quite good and readable.

You can get the .ttf files from here: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/ttf-bitstream-vera/1.10/

Tristan Saghin is a real hero. He saved his sister from drowning into the family pool. Tristan is only nine years (9) old!

How did he know how to do CPR on a person? According to the CNN article, it all began when Tristan saw the movie Black Hawk Down.

Black Hawk Down is a movie about the war in Somalia, where war is, well, war. People die and all kinds of shit happens.

A picture from the movie Black Hawk Down

Now, Black Hawk Down is rated R (“under 17 requires adult guardian”). In the Scandinavian countries, it has an age limit of 15 to 16 years. If they’d show (or rather when they do/did) this movie in the TV in Scandinavia, the announcer would proclaim before the movie starts: “this movie contains scenes which may be harmful to children”.

Not so this time! This time it was just the opposite – it was in fact not only non-harmful, but truly life-saving.

PS. Thank goodness the movie only details war, violence and death. If Tristan had gotten interested in CPR from a movie where naked female breasts are seen, it surely would have created a massive outrage…

From the Wikipedia page for Ashen light:
“Ashen light is a subtle glow that is seen from the night side of the planet Venus.”

“Before the development of more powerful telescopes, early astronomer Franz von Gruithuisen [March 19, 1774 � June 21, 1852] believed that Ashen light was from the fires from celebration of a new Venusian emperor, and later believed that it was the inhabitants burning vegetation to make room for farmland.”

Nice theories, don’t you think? It was likely the best speculation of its time, but just consider how human culture centric those thoughts really were.

1. “fires from celebration of a new Venusian emperor” = Venus has an emperor – implying a hierarchical society – celebrations are conducted on a primitive fashion through the lighting of massive planet-wide fires.
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I don’t really use Skype at home that often. Today I did, and I ran into a problem which I remembered having a long time ago: the voice call audio from me to others sounds lower in pitch, like Darth Vader, or one of those “voice altered to protect the identity” things on TV.

This time, I was arsed enough to fix the Skype issue.

The cause is quite simple: Skype’s SILK voice codec wants to record audio in 24 kHz. However, my HD Audio using Realtek ALC883 chip does not support that sampling rate. Instead, it defaults to 44.1 kHz. The result sounds interesting, but useless for talking over Skype.

So how to fix this? Theory of operation: whatever sampling rate Skype asks you for, just say yes, record in whatever the hardware supports, then rate convert to the sampling rate asked by Skype. This will solve the problem.

To do this in practise, using ALSA, is as follows. First, quit Skype. Don’t just log out, quit the whole thing.

Then, let’s add a software SRC into the proper point in the voice audio uplink path (nerdy!) by adding the following to your ~/.asoundrc:

pcm.skype {                                                                                  
    type plug                                                                                
    slave {                                                                                  
        # normal ALC883                                                                      
        pcm "hw:0,0"                                                                         
                                                                                             
        # skype wants 24 kHz recording input,                                                
        # but ALC883 doesn't support that.                                                   
        # do a rate conversion on the fly.                                                   
        rate 48000                                                                           
    }                                                                                        
}

Note: change the pcm “hw:0,0″ line to whatever is your device – this one uses the default.

To test your new .asoundrc, you can use the command arecord -f S16_LE -c 2 -r 24000 -D skype -d 20 test.wav

If the recording gave no errors, play it back with aplay test.wav. If it sounds OK, you’re good to go.

Next, start Skype. Then go to Options, and set the recording audio device to be “(plug) skype”.

It worked for me, testing using Skype’s echo123 service yields crystal clear audio!

I’m a space exploration buff and when it comes to colonizing places outside of the Earth, especially Mars, I’m all ears.

There are many reasons for my enthusiasm, one of the biggest being that humanity as a race and civilization is 100% certainly doomed if we choose to hole up on the Earth. For example, a cataclysmic asteroid hit is a matter of time – maybe not in my lifetime, nor the 10 following lifetimes, but it is inevitable nevertheless. There are a plethora of other threats as well.

Now, to my delight I saw The Human Mission to Mars – Colonizing the Red Planet in the Journal of Cosmology. If you are interested in space exploration, be sure to bookmark and read that!

Then you can muse, for example, whether you would be willing to go for a one-way mission to Mars. A quick answer of “yes” might turn into “no” once you think of what you’ll be leaving behind. And vice versa, when you think of the new, uncharted territories and a new, free life that awaits you. And once you think what new things and new opportunities you’d attain on Mars, consider this: would it not be easier to attain those here, where the climate outside your dwelling is not yet hostile to human life?

As said, sure to raise thoughts. With this link I wish you a pleasant reading on the wee hours of a happy, new 2011!

PS. For a more (science) fictious approach, I can recommend the Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars book trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.

(From a question about screen savers to musings about problems in adopting and providing radically new technology and technological improvements.)

A friend did a poll and asked “which of you use screen savers?”. So far there’s 4 replies and no-one has fancy animated screensavers, everyone just blanks the screen after a time. Does anyone really use animated screen savers nowadays?
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