I can’t believe it’s over …

So, it’s finally over.. The final show was… absolutely incredible. Of course, I’m talking about Battlestar Galactica. If you haven’t seen the finale yet, then stop reading now, go watch BSG at the UN instead. I’m not here to spoil the ending, but I am going to talk about some of the themes and how they tied up some loose ends.

This review is a tad late, but I didn’t get to see the show until Sunday. Thank the gods for DVRs… I was pleasantly surprised when I noticed that the finale was a full two hours. I was afraid that it would only be an hour long and I had no idea how they would tie everything up in an hour. Even more to my amazement, they tied up most of the major loose ends by the end of the first hour. In fact, I had lost track of time and thought that was the end! Obviously, though, it was not.

I had a few questions throughout the show that they wrapped up quite nicely at the end. Both the original series and this new series had Earth as the mythical destination for the thirteenth colony. Based on this, one would assume that this Earth represents the real Earth today, as it did in the original series. So, it was a bit of a shock when they made it to “Earth” and it was a nuclear wasteland. I had a hard time accepting this and wondered how they would pull the series together after destroying the main goal.

Starbuck leading them to their final destination wasn’t much of a surprised based on the build-up to the finale, but the ultimate question about her remained. If she wasn’t a Cylon, then how could she have died, yet come back? And although there was no definitive answer to this question, I think they cleaned it up quite nicely. What made it more interesting, though, was that she questioned her own existence. She didn’t know what she was, making me think that maybe there were more than 12 models of Cylon. Interestingly enough, that would make her the thirteenth model.. Ah, magic 13.

The final big battle was very exciting. Galactica proved that she could take a serious beating and still complete her mission. Just as impressive was the ability of the crew to plot a jump that landed them directly next to the Cylon colony, keeping them in the same stable orbit around the singularity that the colony was in.

The CGI effects were spectacular. The ship to ship battle lit up the sky with laser and missile fire, explosions, and eventually squadrons of fighters going head to head. Inside, the early model Cylons sped through the corridors, blazing away at each other. They spared nothing putting these sequences together.

One part of the final sequences did bother me, though. In the end, Cyril commits suicide, seemingly for no reason. For someone so determined to live and bring forward a method of survival for his people, he gave up very rapidly. Ronald Moore, one of the producers and writers, explained this as a realization of futility. I’m not sure I buy that, but it doesn’t detract much from the overall story.

I loved the ending, though. Jumping ahead in time, landing right in Times Square with Six and Baltar was incredible. The various videos of robotics breakthroughs all over the screens was a nice touch. It definitely makes one think about the future, what may be possible, and what the consequences of those possibilities may be. I think we have an excellent chance at creating a true AI, and maybe it can all go wrong. In the end, will it be worth it to try?

 

Roll the … Building?

From the air, it looks like something blown over onto it’s side, just another casualty of mother nature. From the ground, it looks like an art sculpture, interesting and colorful. In reality, it’s a transformer. No, not the cool shape-shifting alien robots from Cybertron. This Transformer is a building concept designed by Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, and built by Prada.

The Transformer is flipped and rolled by a group of large cranes, placing the building into one of four configurations. When the hexagon face is flat on the ground, the building serves as a platform for fashion exhibits. Place the circular face on the ground and you have a raised platform for special events. The circular platform in the middle also serves as a projector when the platform is placed on the square face. The square face has raised seating, making it perfect for movie viewing. And finally, when the cross-shaped face is placed on the ground, the building is in the perfect configuration for art exhibits.

The entire building will be covered with a smooth elastic membrane, serving as walls, keeping the entire pavilion free from rain and wind. It remains to be seen how durable that membrane will be with the pavilion being rolled around.

The structure is quite impressive and different. I wonder, however, about the necessity to use large cranes to move it around. Obviously these are necessary as the pavilion likely weighs several hundred tons. The presence of the cranes, however, detracts from the attractiveness of the structure, as well as causing damage to the surrounding grounds. Of course, how else are you going to shift the pavilion from one configuration to another.

The transformer is currently located in Seoul, Korea and will be there from March until July, 2009.

 

Introducing, The Touchbook

Engadget posted a story about a new Netbook from a company called Always Innovating. A press release about the product can be found here. In short, it’s a netbook, and a tablet PC, but without the typical “fold it over on top of the keyboard” scenario. The screen literally detaches from the keyboard and becomes an autonomous unit.

Inside this little beast is an ARM OMAP3 processor with 8 Gig of storage on a micro SD chip. They don’t specify which OMAP3 processor is included, so both speed and die size is unknown. It touts an 8.9″ screen, typical of the current netbook generation. For network access it has 802.11b/g/n Wifi. Bluetooth is also included, so the possibility of tethering exists as well.
Both the tablet and keyboard have built-in batteries. Battery life is expected to be 10 to 15 hours when both the tablet and keyboard are used in-concert. The tablet is expected to last between 3 and 5 hours on battery when it is disconnected from the keyboard. Battery life in the keyboard is, of course, irrelevant.

Always Innovating demonstrated the Touchbook at DEMO 2009, a technical conference that wrapped up yesterday. The demonstration video is included below:

Overall, this looks to be a fairly decent device. I’m a bit concerned about the ARM processor, and I wonder what sort of OS support it will have. The TouchBook OS will be installed by default, though from reading the FAQs, it appears that it will run anything from Android, to Ubuntu, to Windows CE.

I’m also curious as to what the device will be using for memory. Is memory shared on the SD card? Or will there be actual RAM in the device? All questions I hope to have answers for in the near future. Looks good, though, and I’m excited at the prospect of possibly getting one. Definitely something I could put to good use!

 

The more things change….

…the more they stay the same.

The Pirate Bay has been on trial for about a week now. Today, they posted a comic on their home page. It was funny and pretty accurate at the same time. Now I’m not condoning piracy, but I do find TPB to be a great source for downloading TV shows… Yes, I have DirecTV (I’ve complained about it before), so I do actually pay for the content. Anyway, enjoy the comic.

Update: Here’s the original artist of this comic.

Testing a new blogging tool

I joined this really cool network called Mac Developer a few days ago. The programmer from Celmaro, creators of Webbla, pointed me to the site. Anyway, Mac Developer is a beta testing site. Basically, developers put their software up there and let users test it. They can submit bug reports, suggestions, and contribute to making the software better. As a reward for testing software, users gain points that can be used to gain free licenses, discounts, and more.

Anyway, I was alerted yesterday about a new project up there called Blogo. Blogo is, well, blogging software. I’ve used a variety of blogging tools thus far and, to be honest, LiveWriter has been the best. However, as I’ve moved over to a Mac, using LiveWriter is, well, not convenient.

I’ve been looking for something decent to use on my Mac and thus far I’ve only found Ecto and ScribeFire, a Firefox plugin, to be somewhat decent. Neither of these seem to have the features that LiveWriter has, though. LiveWriter handles images quite nicely, even going as far as adding some on-the-spot enhancements such as cropping, adding borders, and more. The interface was actually pretty decent, especially for a Microsoft product.

Anyway, I’ve been checking out Blogo, and I figured writing an actual blog entry might give me some more insight into how it works. Thus far I’m pretty impressed. The interface is pretty straightforward and seems to have all the major features right out in the open. I don’t see anything for video, but I can handle pasting in an embed in html mode. It seems to handle images, so let’s show a screenshot of the editor in action.

According to the image tool, which you can see in action in the next shot, it handles both fullsize and thumbnail images. I definitely like that particular feature. It does not display the image itself in the editor, though, and I’m not sure how I feel about that yet. On the one hand, I suppose it’s ok. On the other, it would be nice to see the image, just to know which image is which. Though clicking on the image in the editor shows it in the little preview area, so that helps a lot and generally saves precious screen real estate.

Blogo has a preview feature as well. It accesses your blog and attempts to create a template that it uses to create a preview of the blog entry. It can periodically update the preview as well. Below, is an image of the preview feature in action.

Anyway, it’s looking to be a pretty decent tool so far. I’ll beat on it some more and hopefully get the points I need to get a discount. If not, I’m definitely interested and unless something really bad pops up, I think I may have found my new blogging tool. Here’s hoping!

 

eBooks and e-Ink

My lovely wife surprised me with a wonderful gift for my birthday (which was a few months ago). She has been pretty eco-friendly for a while and is getting the rest of us on the bandwagon as well. So, while being something that I had wanted for a while, this particular gift also happens to be pretty eco-friendly as well. So what did she get me? Feast your eyes on this!

It’s a Sony PRS-505 eBook reader. The PRS-505 uses LRF as its native format, though it also supports TXT, PDF, and RTF. The latest firmware update also brings the new ePub format to the table as well. It does support secure versions of LRF, PDF, and ePub, though I have not encountered them as of yet.

The screen is about the size of a standard paperback book and uses something called electronic paper for display. E-paper is a pretty cool technology that can be used to display static images with very little power. Due to how e-paper works, it is much easier on the eyes as compared to reading from an LCD.

I’ve been looking at eBook readers for a while and comparing the various differences between them. And while the Sony doesn’t have all of the best features, it does have support for the formats I was interested in. Sure, the Kindle supports other formats like PDF, but you have to send the file to Amazon to have it converted. This is not something you want to do with confidential work documents. And the Kindle has wireless support, but I didn’t think that was a compelling enough feature to lock me in to Amazon’s DRM. So, in the end, I chose the Sony.

And since I’ve had it, I’ve discovered that it has very rich Open Source support! In particular is a project called calibre. Calibre is an open source book management tool written specifically for the Sony PRS family of eBook readers, though support for other readers is starting to be integrated. What makes calibre more useful than Sony’s own eBook management software is the ability to convert a slew of different formats to formats that the PRS supports.

For instance, I can convert a .DOC file to .LRF. Or, even cooler, I can convert a .CBR over to a .LRF. CBR, if you don’t know, is a compressed comic book format. So in addition to reading books, manuals, etc, I can also catch up on comics! Calibre also has a feature that allows you to synchronize various RSS feeds with your reader. Feeds are automatically downloaded, converted to .LRF, and transferred to your reader. Old versions of the feeds can be removed automatically as well.

Calibre does not support secure, or DRM’ed, formats though, so you have to watch what you purchase. Fortunately, there are a few sites out there that provide DRM-free reading material in most of the popular formats. Baen Books is one of the more popular sites for DRM-free reading material. Baen deals in Sci-fi and Fantasy books. Another fine book site is Fictionwise which seems to deal in just about any genre. And finally, there’s MobiPocket, who also deals with all genres.

One problem I’ve noticed with purchasing eBooks, however, is that you generally pay the same, or more, for the eBook version as compared to a printed version. The “accepted” explanation seems to be that if eBooks were cheaper, it would hurt the printed business, so they price them the same. This is unfortunate. I find it hard to pay the same price for an electronic copy when it doesn’t have to go through the same printing process as a paper book. I’d like to believe that the extra money a publisher makes on an eBook goes to the author, but if they’re anything like the music industry, I’m sure the author never sees any of it.

Regardless, I thoroughly enjoy my new eBook reader. I’ve been spending my time catching up on comics and reading many of the free eBooks available at the Tor.com site. If you’re into Sci-Fi and Fantasy, I definitely recommend checking it out.

If you’re interested in eBook readers in general and what the future may hold, check out this article as ars technica. It’s a pretty good look at the start of eBooks as well as some insight into the future.