Not my practice blog, by Scott Knaster

New monorails at Disneyland

Check 'em out at The Disney Blog.

Radio 10,000 times thinner than a human hair

Wacky fun physicists at the University of California at Berkeley have created a radio that's less than 100 billionths of a meter wide -- a single carbon nanotube. You can watch a video of the radio being tuned to play Good Vibrations, or read a research paper about the radio (PDF).

Sputnik 50th anniversary

It was 50 years ago today that the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial object to orbit the earth. This news stunned and awed Americans, who had failed to launch a satellite of their own and were wary of the Soviets. Sputnik became big news in the U.S. There were Sputnik burgers (a fried ball of meat and dough), a Sputnik dance, and Sputnik hairdos.

Happy birthday, Sputnik!

Google is commemorating the day with a Google Doodle:

Google Sets

Here's something interesting you might not have noticed from O'Legog's search engine shop: Google Sets. When you visit Google Sets, you type in a few items that have something in common, click a button, and Google tries to figure out a bunch more items that belong in the set.

For example, when I type in Campbell, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, San Jose, Milpitas (cities near where I live), Google Sets says:
santa clara
mountain view
los altos
palo alto
saratoga
los gatos
morgan hill
menlo park
gilroy
fremont

Cool.

When I enter Bonds, Vizquel, Winn, Durham, and Aurilia (San Francisco Giants players), I get:

feliz
alfonzo
molina
roberts
alou
snow
linden
grissom
cruz
santiago

Yep, all Giants and former Giants.

You can even use it as a thesaurus. I entered joyous, thrilled, happy, excited, cheerful and asked for a large set. I got:

playful
fun
carefree
exuberant
energetic
sweet
rousing
summery
innocent
rollicking
freewheeling
confident
lively
boisterous
earnest
stylish
sentimental
passionate
warm
elegant
romantic
earthy
bright
whimsical
gleeful
sophisticated
light
humorous
smooth
gentle
swaggering
rambunctious
poignant
sensual
witty
springlike
organic
quirky
soothing
silly
naive

Handy.

For special fun, go to Google Docs and create a spreadsheet. Type a few items into cells. Then hold down option (on a Mac) or ctrl (on Windows or Linux) and drag through the cells and into blank cells below or to the right. The new cells will fill in with items from Google Sets. See here for more.

Unfortunate algorithmic abbreviation

Lately I've been getting a lot of "Join my network" requests from folks on LinkedIn. A couple of days ago I had one from a guy named Christopher. LinkedIn gave me the 3 standard buttons to use for handling this request -- but unfortunately, Christopher's name was too long to fit on one of the buttons:

Google Video fixes a bug

Google shut down paid videos on Google Video and kinda screwed it up. Boo.

So then Google listened to many many complaints, and has now apologized and fixed it. Excellent.

Memories #2: Microsoft

I worked for Microsoft for almost 7 years, from 1996 to 2003. There were good times and less-good times. The beginning was terrific, when I got to work with the Mac Internet Explorer team (aka MS-Bay), a renegade bunch hired specifically to make Mac software that was not cloned from Windows applications. Early Mac IE was a great browser, designed and built specifically for the Mac by veteran Mac programmers, and I learned a bunch from that team.

My job was writing documentation and, by default, doing press, evangelism, and PR, since nobody in Redmond wanted to spend much time doing special stuff for the Mac. It was a blast. I enjoyed the dissonance of working at hated Microsoft but being part of a group that produced an excellent Mac browser. Very often we won folks over, because we had a great product: I even convinced my former boss Guy Kawasaki that IE was better. But some people would not be persuaded. Once, at Macworld Expo, we were handing out CDs with Mac IE on them. One guy asked for extra CDs. Hey, great, I thought: a fan. No, he said: he liked to put them in the microwave. At another Macworld I was interviewed live on local radio while a crowd gathered behind me and made rude gestures. Ah, memories.

After the Mac team, the jobs weren't as great as often, but I stuck around. I liked a lot of things about Microsoft, but I also wondered how such smart people could turn out products that were, let's say, not always smart, and I wasn't a fan of all the company's business practices. I guess that makes me something of a hypocrite, because I stayed there for years. But when I saw the item pictured below in the Microsoft company store, I thought it was a great statement about the company and lock-in: get 'em while they're young.

Dell Vostro

Dell has a new line of notebook computers...and the nifty new brand name is Vostro. What the hell? Vostro is sort of a Latin word, and apparently Dell thinks it sounds pretty cool. As the kids say: meh.

iPhone gets the details right

Five minutes in the life of an iPhone:

I've been using the iPod part of my iPhone a lot to listen to music at work (instead of an actual iPod), partly because it's so much fun to glance over and see the big, bright album art while songs are playing. Yesterday, I needed to call two local newspapers. So, sitting in my office and listening to music, I used my laptop to look up the phone number of the first newspaper, then walked outside to make the call. I grabbed the iPhone and kept listening to music as I walked outside.

When I got outside, I navigated to the phone part of the iPhone. The music kept playing as I dialed the number. When I pressed the Call button, the music gently faded out, and the call went through. Soon I was talking to the first newspaper using the hidden mic in the iPhone ear buds. While I was talking, I was put on hold, and I realized I could use the phone to look up the other newspaper's number while I was waiting. I went to the Safari app and started searching for the second newspaper's number. When I did, a thin strip appeared at the top of the screen with the text "Touch to return to call". Neat.

After I finished my first call, the person at the other end hung up. The phone figured out the call was over, faded the music back in and started playing where it left off. Meanwhile, I was looking at the web page with the second phone number I needed to call. I noticed the phone number was underlined, like a hyperlink, so I touched it. A confirmation box appeared with Cancel and Call buttons. I touched call, the music faded out, and the second call happened.

This time, the iPhone didn't detect when the call ended, so I pressed the "Touch to return to call" strip, which took me back to the phone screen, where I touched End Call. Once again, the music faded back up and resumed where it left off.

I've never owned a smartphone before, and maybe your smartphone works this well, but I came away from this brief experience feeling satisfied about how well Apple had nailed lots of little details.

Video games hidden on LP records

Back in the late 1970s and early '80s, most personal computers used audio signals stored on cassette tapes as a storage medium. Some clever bands figured out that they could hide software on their LP records. Various kinds of programs were hidden, including actual video games. Users had to record the LPs onto tape, then load the tape into the computer. Here's a thorough description of many of these tracks hidden on LP-ROM, and even a few links to copies that are now available on the web.

Lost technologies are cool.