Windows start up programs

Ever wish you could easily get a list of all the programs that Windows runs on start up? There is a wonderful free utility that does this called autoruns from Sysinternals who have several other wonderful free utilities. Highly recommended for technical types who want to know why Windows takes so long to boot and why does that particular icon show up in the system tray and how do you get rid of stupid programs you didn't want in the first place and ... You get the idea.

Enoteca

There is a restaurant near my office called "Enoteca". There is something about that name that has bothered me ever since I first noticed it. Then it finally dawned on me: Enoteca, which is a general name for an Italian wine bar, is the name of a toxic liquid when spelled backward.

Glad I figured that out...

In the blink of an eye

I make video productions as a hobby. Student productions of plays, amateur musicals, that kind of thing. Just amateur stuff, but I use decent DV camcorders and high-quality audio recording.

Thanks to some software my son wrote, I can edit video from multiple sources into a reasonable looking production with multiple camera angles, cuts, dissolves, fades, etc. It's a huge step up in quality from the usual single camera point-and-forget affair.

So now that I am a video editor, it has got me thinking. Why do cuts in movies work at all? Why doesn't a sudden change of point of view and/or distance look so strange to the human visual perception system that it is jarring and incomprehensible?

In his thoughtful book, In the Blink of an Eye, film editor Walter Murch suggests a plausible answer. Humans perceive the world discontinuously as a matter of course. It is well known that when you read, your eyes don't smoothly sweep across the lines of text. Instead, they move to a specific location, pause, you absorb what you see, then they jerk to the next location and pause, and so on. Murch goes on to assert that blinking is overrated as a mechanism to absorb the eyeballs. Instead, a blink provides a boundary between different points of view as your eyes bounce around to take in your visual surroundings.

It is not hard to see an analogy with the way those of us in the technology business see the world. We pause briefly to consider an idea, then in the blink of an eye we context switch to a completely different (and possibly even contradictory) point of view. The brain is adept at assembling these fragments into some sort of coherent whole. It feels natural rather than weird. The hard thing to explain is how people can focus on a chess or Go board for a couple of hours!

Bandwidth, storage make advances over medieval technologies!

Anyone who uses the internet (Wired magazine now advocates that we use a lower-case 'i') and has any sense of history feels awed by the advance in human communication it represents.

Here's where it fits in an exponentially accelerating rate of key milestones:

• 50,000 years ago: origins of human language
• 5,000 years ago: emergence of written language
• 500 years ago: movable type enables the printing press in Europe
• 50 years ago: ARPA initiates projects that evolve into the internet
• 5 years ago (-ish): the W3C issues the XML specification as a recommendation

OK, that last milestone reflects my personal prejudice that XML is as significant an enabling technology for electronic written communication as movable type was for the printing press. More on that another day.

Another perspective on how far we've come is the increase of bandwidth of communication in the last 100 years or so. By 1928, telegraph transmission rates reached 2,800 characters per minute or 0.4 kbps. It was still faster to fly a copy of the New York Times across the Atlantic, a transmission rate that I estimate to be about 1.4 kpbs. Today of course electronic transmission of information is faster than any alternative by orders of magnitude.

In his fascinating survey of the history of letters, Alpha Beta, John Man presents the following data: In AD 500 the world was using perhaps 500 tons of paper for books. At the turn of the millenium that number had risen to 130 million tons. "Per person, we consume almost 20,000 times as much reading material as our medieval ancestors." Most of this material disappears within a day or a year.

But in electronic form, much more information can be stored indefinitely. This is only of value if you can find the information again, otherwise you have the proverbial "write-only database". Google seems pretty much on track to solve that problem and become the portal to all human knowledge. At least if full-text search and page rank are sufficient to find what we are looking for.

The next great challenge is to get information out of people's desktops and into the public realm. Did I mention XML above? More on this later...