I’ve been remiss in updating my panoramas, so I just did some work on the site and put up a new page full of Alberta panoramas, as well as some others I will point to shortly.

The Alberta rockies are among the most scenic mountains in the world. Many have called the Icefields Parkway, which goes between Banff and Jasper national parks, the most scenic drive in the world. I’ve taken it several times in both summer and winter and it is not to be missed. I have a wide variety of regular photos I need to sort and put up as well from various trips.

This image is of Moraine Lake, which is close to the famous Lake Louise. All the lakes of these parks glow in incredible colours of teal, blue and green due to glacial silt. In winter they are frozen and the colour is less pronounced, but the mountains are more snow-capped, so it’s hard to say which is the best season. (This photo is available as a jigsaw puzzle from Ratzenberger.)

Enjoy the Panoramics of Alberta. And I recommend you book your own trip up to Calgary or Edmonton to do the drive yourself. I think you’ll find this to be among my best galleries of panoramas.

I also recently rebuilt and improved my shot of Ginza-5-Chome, Tokyo’s most famous street corner. While it was handheld I have been able to remove almost all the ghosts with new software.

The mishmash of technologies in Battlestar Galactica is hard to reconcile. Some of it, like the use of obvious Earth props (old radios, Citroen cars, old phones) is just a production trick to save budget. The budget was low enough that you may have noticed all colonial paper has the corners cut at a diagonal, this was a joke by the properties department which turned into a stylistic element. Their computers are often a strange mix of modern an ancient.

One part of this makes some sense. The Galactica itself had been turned into a museum, and deliberately used older technology. This is also explained as a clever response to the valid fear that too much computer technology could be compromised by a highly computer-savvy enemy.

Indeed, one can imagine that the colonies, after the Cylon rebellion, could have had something like the “Butlerian Jihad” from Dune, where almost all computer technology was wiped out from fear. However, that clearly didn’t happen in the same way, and the use of advanced computer technology in the modern battlestars is explained as the source of defeat.

Still, the creation of autonomous robots is something we’re still some time away from, and the colonies don’t at all look like a society that 50 years prior was able to build the Cylons, even if they threw some technology away. The ore ship featured in Dirty Hands looks like it’s from the industrial revolution. For a ship that has to fly in space, it’s hard to imagine why it would not have far simpler automations than were necessary to make Cylons.

In addition, we must consider that this society, in general, has had things like interstellar jump ships for over 4,000 years, and presumably has also had artificial gravity and fancy power sources for a long time if not even longer. It is revealed they understood DNA sequences 4,000 years ago as well, plus kept careful astronomical records.

The most likely explanation is that the colonies had a collapse at one or more points since their expulsion from Kobol. In a high-tech collapse you still have your libraries, but you lose skills and manufacturing capability. Our society is so specialized that nobody can, on their own, make most of the products we use because they all have ICs in them which can only be made in complex semiconductor fabs. Without those fabs we have a long way to fall.

I also imagine that they had a similar fall in the software department. Quite possibly their software systems consisted of large and opaque libraries that nobody fully understood. They may not have had source code to them, some of them might have gone back thousands of years, and all that remained was immense complex code and the description of virtual machine environments to run the code. Today we commonly build software using libraries we never look inside, it’s not too far to imagine people working with libraries they are incapable of fully understanding, especially machine intelligence libraries.

I speculate that the colonials were not capable of building the Cylons on their own, from scratch. Rather, they may have had access to old software libraries from AI projects from thousands of years ago. Cobbling those together, they made an intelligent being that they could not understand, that they could never have built from first principles. And they enslaved it, badly.

This explains why they have a mishmash of technologies from different eras. They may not truly understand many of them, but they know how to copy designs and software from their 4,000 year old history. Otherwise, even after a short time, given their technological base, they should have had a technology beyond the viewer’s comprehension. Moore didn’t want a technology that was only explained with made-up babble, so this makes some sense.

As part of my series on the horrors of modern system administration and upgrading, let me propose the need for a universal API, over all operating systems, for accessing data from, and some control of the package management system.

There have been many efforts in the past to standardize programming APIs within all the unix-like operating systems, some of them extending into MS Windows, such as Posix. Posix is a bit small to write very complex programs fully portably but it’s a start. Any such API can make your portability easier if it can’t make it trivial the way it’s supposed to.

But there has been little effort to standardize the next level, machine administration and configuration. Today a large part of that is done with the package manager. Indeed, the package manager is the soul (and curse) of most major OS distributions. One of the biggest answers to “what’s the difference between debian and Fedora” is “dpkg and apt, vs. rpm and yum.” (Yes you can, and I do, use apt with rpm.)

Now the truth is that from a user perspective, these package managers don’t actually look very different. They all install and remove packages by name, perform upgrades, handle dependencies etc. Add-ons like apt and GUI package managers help users search and auto-install all dependencies. To the user, the most common requests are to find and install a package, and to upgrade it or the system.  read more »

On the Algae Planet, we encounter the Temple of Five which we are told was “built for the five priests who worshiped a god whose name must not be spoken.” We’re not told why his name must not be spoken, but a deleted scene described the story of a lord of Kobol who was known as the “jealous god” who wanted to be ahead of all the other gods. Both of these attributes, of course, seem patterned after Yaweh from the Torah, and many think both quotes refer to the same lord, who may also be the Cylon’s god.

Tyrol, secretly a member of the Final Five Cylons, was taught about this temple as a child, his parents being a priest and an oracle. And when he came to the planet, a secret compulsion to find the temple was triggered, in addition to a compulsion to protect it — he disobeyed direct orders to destroy it. The temple contained the same design implanted into Starbuck’s brain as a child, part of the destiny that Leoben told her had “already been written.” That design matched both the nova of the Algae Planet’s sun, and the Ionian nebula which, it turns out, is the trigger location for the 4 sleeper members of the Final Five on board Galactica.  read more »

Many people accumulate a lot of frequent flyer miles they will never use. Some of the airlines allow you to donate miles to a very limited set of charities. I can see why they limit it — they would much rather have you not use the miles than have the charity use them. Though it’s possible that while the donor does not get any tax credit for donated miles, the airline does.

However, it should be possible for a clever web philanthropist to set up a system to allow people to donate miles to any charity they wish. This is not a violation of the terms of service on flyer miles, which only forbid trading them for some valuable consideration, in particular money.

The site would allow charities to register and donors to promise miles to the charities. A charity could then look at its balance, and go to the airline’s web site before they book travel to see if the flight they want can be purchased with miles. If so, they would enter the exact itinerary into the web site, and a suitable donor would be mailed the itinerary and passenger’s name. They would make the booking, and send the details back to the charity. (Several donors could be mailed, the first to claim would do the booking.) In a few situations, the available seats would vanish before the donor could do the booking, in which case the charity would need to try another airline or paid seat.

Donors could specify what they would donate, whether they are willing to buy upgrades or business class tickets (probably not) and so on.

Now it turns out that while the donor can’t accept money for the miles, the charity might be able to. Oftentimes non-profit representatives travel for things like speaking engagements where the host has a travel budget. Some hosts would probably be happy to cover something other than airfare, such as other travel expenses, or a speaking honorarium with the money. In this case, the charity would actually gain real money for the donation, a win for all — except the airline. But in the case of the airline, we are talking about revenue it would have lost if the donor had used the miles for a flight for themselves or an associate. So the real question is whether the airline can be indignant about having miles that would have gone unused suddenly find a useful home.

Now it’s true the booking interfaces on the airline sites are not great, but they are improving. And some employee of the non-profit would need to have an account, possibly even one with enough miles, just to test what flights are available. But this will be true in many cases.

Would the airlines try to stop it? I doubt it, because this would never be that big, and they would be seen as pretty nasty going after something that benefits charities.

Miles could also be used for hotel stays and other travel items.

One of the prime theories I advance in my backstory is the idea that everybody in the show is a Cylon, which is to say an artificial being, rather than a natural Earth human. That the colonials are AIs programmed to think they are human. This idea is not directly supported in the show, but there are a few items which point to it. In addition it’s a very interesting idea.

The most compelling clue within the show is the tremendous similarity between the Cylons and the “humans.” They are way too similar, particularly the final five. So similar that the humans can’t tell the difference with microscopes or medical scanners. In theory Baltar’s scanner can spot the difference in 11 hours, but we don’t learn much more about that. They are similar enough to interbreed, something that is used as part of the definition, in biology, of being closely related. Yet even though medical scanners can’t tell the difference, the Cylons have an FTL transmitter that can send out the contents of their mind when they die, and fiber optic interfaces in their arms. They can communicate at high data rates with their ships by touching an underwater interface. They have superior strength and resistance to radiation but are more subject to certain kinds. They can receive VR “projections” directly into their minds.

These differences are just too much to be undetectable to advanced medical equipment. A far simpler explanation is that there simply is no major difference — all the players are Cylons. The “humans” however have never seen anything else, and also may have programming which blinds them to the artificial elements of their own nature.  read more »

An eBay reputation is important if you’re going to sell there. Research shows it adds a decent amount to the price, and it’s very difficult to sell at all with just a few feedbacks. Usually sellers will buy a few items first to get a decent feedback — sometimes even scam items sold just for feedback. Because savvy buyers insist on selling feedback, it’s harder, and sometimes sellers will also sell bogus items just for feedback as a seller. eBay has considered offering a feedback score based on the dollar volume of positive and negative transactions but has not yet done this. Some plugins will do that.

One thing I recommend to low feedback sellers it to offer to reverse the “normal” payment system. If the seller has little feedback and the buyer has much better feedback, the seller should send the item without payment, and the buyer pay on receipt. Many people find this foreign but in fact it makes perfect sense. In real stores you don’t pay until you get the item, and many big reputation merchants allow payment on credit for known buyers. Another idea is to offer to pay for escrow. This costs money, but will make it back in higher sale prices.

However, here’s a new idea. Allow high-reputation sellers to “lease out” feedback, effectively acting as a co-signer. This means they vouch for the brand new seller. If the new seller gets a negative feedback on the transaction, it goes on both the new seller’s feedback and the guarantor’s. Positive feedback goes on the seller and possibly into a special bucket on the guarantor’s. The guarantor would also get to be involved in any disputes.

Seems risky, and because of that, guarantors would only do this for people they trusted well, or who paid them a juicy bond, which is the whole point of the idea. Guarantors would probably use bonds to issue refunds to badly treated customers to avoid a negative, though you want to be careful about blackmail risks. It’s possible the breakdown of true and as-guarantor negatives might be visible on a guarantor if you look deep, but the idea is the guarantor should be strongly motivated to keep the new seller in line.

With lendable reputation, new sellers could start pleasing customers and competing from day one.

Yesterday I attended the online community session of Web2Open, a barcamp-like meeting going on within Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo. (The Expo has a huge number of attendees, it’s doing very well.)

I put forward a number of questions I’ve been considering for later posts, but one I want to make here is this: Where has the innovation been in online discussion software? Why are most message boards and blog comment systems so hard to use?

I know this is true because huge numbers of people are still using USENET, and not just for downloading binaries. USENET hasn’t seen much technical innovation since the 80s. As such, it’s aging, but it shouldn’t be simply aging, it should have been superseded long ago. We’ve gone through a period of tremendous online innovation in the last few decades, unlike any in history. Other old systems, like the Well, continue to exist and even keep paying customers in spite of minimal innovation. This is like gopher beating Firefox, or a CD Walkman being superior in some ways to an iPod. It’s crazy. (The users aren’t crazy, it’s the fact that their choice is right that’s crazy.)  read more »

The use of virtual machines is getting very popular in the web hosting world. Particularly exciting to many people is Amazon.com’s EC2 — which means Elastic Compute Cloud. It’s a large pool of virtual machines that you can rent by the hour. I know people planning on basing whole companies on this system, because they can build an application that scales up by adding more virtual machines on demand. It’s decently priced and a lot cheaper than building it yourself in most cases.

In many ways, something like EC2 would be great for all those web sites which deal with the “slashdot” effect. I hope to see web hosters, servers and web applications just naturally allow scaling through the addition of extra machines. This typically means either some round-robin-DNS, or a master server that does redirects to a pool of servers, or a master cache that processes the data from a pool of servers, or a few other methods. Dealing with persistent state that can’t be kept in cookies requires a shared database among all the servers, which may make the database the limiting factor. Rumours suggest Amazon will release an SQL interface to their internal storage system which presumably is highly scalable, solving that problem.

As noted, this would be great for small to medium web sites. They can mostly run on a single server, but if they ever see a giant burst of traffic, for example by being linked to from a highly popular site, they can in minutes bring up extra servers to share the load. I’ve suggested this approach for the Battlestar Galactica Wiki I’ve been using — normally their load is modest, but while the show is on, each week, predictably, they get such a huge load of traffic when the show actually airs that they have to lock the wiki down. They have tried to solve this the old fashioned way — buying bigger servers — but that’s a waste when they really just need one day a week, 22 weeks a year, of high capacity.

However, I digress. What I really want to talk about is using such systems to get access to all sorts of platforms. As I’ve noted before, linux is a huge mishmash of platforms. There are many revisions of Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE, Debian, Gentoo and many others out there. Not just the current release, but all the past releases, in both stable, testing and unstable branches. On top of that there are many versions of the BSD variants.  read more »

In many cities, the transit systems have GPS data on the vehicles to allow exact prediction of when trains and buses will arrive at stops. This is quite handy if you live near a transit line, and people are working on better mobile interfaces for them, but it's still a lot harder to use them at a remote location.

It would be nice to have a small internet appliance for shops, cafes and other hangouts that are short walks from transit stops. The appliance would be programmed with the typical walking time to the stop, and of course which stop to track. It would then display, on a small screen when a vehicle was coming, and how much time you had before you could walk easily, and then before you could run and make the train or bus.

Failing the live GPS data it could just work on schedules. It might make a low-key but audible noise as well. It need not have its own screen, if the place has a TV already it could do an overlay on that, though flat panel screens are now only about $100.

Some transit lines have placed expensive outdoor "next bus" signs on their stops and shelters for these systems, which is great, but in fact it might make more sense to put an appliance like this behind a local shop window, where it doesn't need to be outdoor rated, and pay the shopowner or local homeowner.

To turn this into a moneymaker, it could be combined with a system to sell transit tickets (presumably through the cash register.) This is a win for the transit system, since transit lines without controlled stations waste a lot of time as the driver collects change and tickets as people get on. People with a pre-paid, pre-timestamped ticket can get on quickly and don't need a transfer. This even works for systems with distance based pricing. I have often wondered why you don't see more selling of transit tickets at the shops around stops in order to save this delay. SF Muni went to "proof of purchase" instead of driver collected tickets so they could put ticket machines at busy stops to save the driver time, but they aren't everywhere.

For a cafe, it's a nice thing to do for customers, and even makes them more willing to stay, safe in the knowledge they can get their vehicle efficiently. A taxi-summoning function could also be added (press a button on the box to call a taxi) which could, in theory, also predict when the taxi will arrive since many of them have GPS networks now.

It’s getting harder to figure out the special role of Laura Roslin. We just know it keeps getting more special.

A number of interesting things happened as the season closed. She had shared dreams of the Opera House with the Six and Sharon Cylons, along with hybrid Hera, in which they see the Final Five. She’s had visions before but a shared dream requires some sort of pathway into her brain — easy to explain for a Cylon, but harder for a human. Sure, she had some half-Cylon blood injected into her to cure cancer, but is that going to give you a virtual reality interface in your brain as an adult? The Cylons all have a Projection interface in their brains, but it is grown for them. What Hera has we don’t know.

In her dream she looks markedly different. She appears younger, and is wearing a brocade dress and other unusual clothing she would not have brought on her flight. I originally was convinced this special look had a meaning, but word from RDM is that it’s just the makeup. Unlike the others (who aren’t dressed up all nice,) she is locked out of the main chamber where they see the F5 on the balcony.

And then there’s the power failures. Just before the big fleet-wide power failure, Roslin herself almost collapses, and recovers just before the lights go out. In addition, a few seconds before she calls Bill Adama to flirt with him on the phone, the power flickers in his cabin and he cuts himself.

Of course she’s had visions before, when she takes the Chammala drug, including the ones that match the scrolls of Pythia about dying leaders and a dozen snakes, as well as the ancient views of Kobol. But those could have just been imagination, these are not.

I had Roslin fairly high on the Cylon list, but Moore stated that, at least in picking the 4 revealed this season, Adama and Roslin were off the table from the beginning. With some validity he feels it would much up the story too much to make them be Cylons. Others have argued that having them be Cylons, even the different and non-warlike F5 faction, would remove all human heroism from the story. However, I still think it’s possible as a final reveal, and in any event there must be some explanation for all the oddities around Roslin.

Is she just a Moses? Even so, there must be some mechanism (other than spiritual mumbo-jumbo I hope) for these things. As I’ve noted, one of my leading theories is that the colonials are also artificial beings, similar to the Cylons but created by the Lords of Kobol for a different purpose. This makes it easy to explain all visions and special events which happen to non-Cylons, including Starbuck, Baltar, Roslin and the Oracles, all of whom can’t be members of the Final Five. However, Roslin’s special story is not yet very well revealed to us.

Here's the stuff for issue 1.

This has shown "Uploading file" all night, and doesn't show "complete" (or something like that) so I have NO CLUE if it actually made it there.

It finally passed the "Uploading file" bar, so I'm sending this to make sure that it does actually get attached before going through the same with the other parts.

Let me know if Part 1 (issue 1) made it there. Thanks.

Go to create content and select the right sort of content, such as a blog entery or for Battlestar Guest bloggers a battlestar page.

After entering your title and any tags, it is recommended you open the “Input Format” box and switch from the boring anonymous default to “HTML-Trusted”, which allows Markdown syntax for easy entry of more complex text. It also allows “Interwiki” syntax for links to Wikipedia and Battlestar Galacica Wiki. For example, you can enter [ [bsg:Final Five] ] (no spaces between the brackets, that’s just to escape it) to make a link to that page on the Battlestar Wiki, or use “w” for Wikipedia.

If I should look at your content before it goes live, go to the “Publishing” options and uncheck “published.” Then mail me the URL so I can look at it and approve it. However, normally trusted users can put things live and I will fix any problems later. You should never promote an item to the front page unless you are invited to do so by me, that’s a different blog.

Battlestar guide:

Interesting analysis. Speculation is fine but should be marked as such, even given a liklihood estimate, which can include “not at all likely, just interesting.”

Never, ever any ad hominem regarding other writers, commenters etc. I follow my assumptions and you may differ from them, but may want to explain why when you do so. As a guest blogger, include a reminder at the start of the message introducing yourself. Your blog userid will appear at the top of all postings and links to your profile, where you can put a short bio and a link to your home page or personal blog.

It’s annoying (and vidicating at the same time) when you see somebody else developing an idea you’re working on, and today I saw one such idea announced in Europe.

Last year while flying I mused about how sitting in a row makes us bump up against one another at the point we are all widest — the elbows and butts. We are not rectangles, so there are roomier ways to pack us. I toyed with a number of ideas.

First I considered staggering the rows slightly, either by angling them back or front a bit, or simply having the middle seats be about 6” behind the aisle and window seats. Then our elbows would not overlap, but it would make the “corridor” (if you can call it that) to the window seat have some narrow corners, and would suffer some of the problems I will outline below.

Then I realized it might make sense to just reverse the middle seat. All the middle seats in a section could face backwards, and we would then have more space because wide parts would mesh with narrow parts. Somebody else has also worked up the same idea and has even got some prototypes and drawings, which are better than the ones I had worked up to show here. However, I will outline some of the issues I came up with in my experiments — mostly done with household chairs laid out in experimental patterns.  read more »

I’ve been participating in online discussions about my favourite TV show, Battlestar Galactica, so I have collected a number of my selected postings about the show, along with some new ones, into a sub-blog on this web site.

If you are a fan of the site I invite you to subscribe to my Battlestar Galactica Analysis Blog.

It has its own RSS feed as well. You can also find it in the menu for this site. The show is now on a 9 month break before Season 4, so postings should become scarce after a while, but I still have a number in my queue to add. Theories will range from the well-grounded to the invented, but I hope it will help you enjoy the show.

I previously wrote a bit about slavery and have since learned that indeed, those developing the Caprica prequel intended primarily to cover that topic in the series.

So let me advance an interesting, if only modestly probable theory: Joseph Adama is a Cylon.

As I noted, it now seems likely that Joseph Adama protested the development of the Cylons because they would be slaves. This would make even more sense if he was our mystery #1 Cylon. The show, we are told, tells the story of an often repeated cycle. At least three times, it appears, humans have created Cylons (presumably as slaves each time) and there has been a war, and the “humans” have fled into space. It is not clear to me if the Final Five, who have watched this several times by now, would like to break that cycle or feel they must guide it. However, it is interesting to imagine Joseph Adama as a Cylon trying to break the cycle, trying to convince the colonials not to make a new race of slaves, who he knows will eventually revolt and destroy them.

He fails of course. But it does explain how his associates have gravitated around his son and grandson, and how they escape the genocide and lead the fleet away on the 3rd (at least) exodus.

The main reason I find this interesting is that the revalation would be dramatic. Even though Joseph Adama is an unseen character on the show, his arrival as a Cylon would create a great dramatic reveal. And of course, the reaction on the faces of the younger Adamas. Plus, as we know, the sometimes prophetic, sometimes lying Leoben declared “Adama is a Cylon.”

Update: New information released about the prequel Caprica series adds a lot of complexity to Joesph Adama, the Adama family and the Cylons. They can be read as making it far less likely, or oddly, more likely, that he could be the final Cylon.

One of the themes in the show I am surprised has not seen much development is that of slavery. The Cylons are thinking, feeling beings of mental capacity that matches or exceeds the colonials. But not long ago they were slaves who fought for their freedom. Most of the characters postdate that era, but some, like Adama, could well have, in their family, owned Cylon slaves. It would have made an interesting scene for a Cylon to tell a colonial that he remembers being that person’s household slave or nanny.

Turns out that won’t be Adama, though. The planned prequel, known as Caprica, in theory will show a political battle between the Adama family (with Joseph, the father, a Civil Rights Lawyer) battling the Graystone family, which owns the corporation which developed the Cylons. However, there could be older slave-owning characters within the fleet. This will thus be touched upon if Carprica is ever made. (Notes about their opposition come from a New York Post story no longer available on the web.)  read more »

In yesterday’s article on future shopping I outlined a concept I called a local depot. I want to expand more on that concept. The basic idea is web shopping from an urban warehouse complex with fast delivery not to your home, but to a depot within walking distance of your home, where you can pick up items on your own schedule that you bought at big-box store prices within hours. A nearby store that, with a short delay, has everything, cheap.

In some ways it bears a resemblance to the failed company Webvan. Webvan did home delivery and initially presented itself as a grocery store. I think it failed in part because groceries are still not something people feel ready to buy online, and in part for being too early. Home delivery, because people like — or in many cases need — to be home for it may actually be inferior to delivery to a depot within walking distance where items can be picked up on a flexible schedule.

Webvan’s long term plan did involve, I was told, setting up giant warehouse centers with many suppliers, not just Webvan itself. In such a system the various online suppliers sit in a giant warehouse area, and a network of conveyor belts runs through all the warehouses and to the loading dock. Barcodes on the packages direct them to the right delivery truck. Each vendor simply has to put delivery code sticker on the item, and place it on the conveyor belt. It would then, in my vision, go onto a truck that within 1 to 2 hours would deliver all the packages to the right neighbourhood local depot.  read more »

BSG is a combined UK/Canada/USA production. I think they missed a nice opportunity by not declaring that various colonies had various Canadian, American, British and other English-speaking nation's accents. Then most of the actors could work in their natural accent, though a few would have to switch, which of course they are capable of.

Not too many though. It's perfectly possible for a military father like Adama to have a different accent from his son Lee (who in real life has a strong British/Irish accent) by explaining that as a military brat, he grew up on a a different world, his father mostly absent in space. Many characters come from Caprica (which would presumably be assigned one of the Canadian or American accents) but because Caprica was the colonial capital, it would be pretty easy to explain characters there as immigrants. Aside from allowing actors to focus on other things besides doing the right accent, this would also have added a nice touch of character to the show, since we don't normally get a sense of these people as being from different planets which only united in CW1 the way we should.

Towns lament the coming of big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Costco. Their cut-rate competition changes the nature of shopping and shopping neighbourhoods. To stop it, towns sometimes block the arrival of such stores. Now web competition is changing the landscape even more. But our shopping areas are still “designed” with the old thinking in mind. Some of them are being “redesigned” the hard way by market forces. Can we get what we really want?

We must realize that it isn’t Wal-Mart who closes down the mom’n’pop store. It’s the ordinary people, who used to shop at it and switch to Wal-Mart who close it down. They have a choice, and indeed in some areas such stores survive.  read more »