Matt Berryman

Husband, Father, Fixer-of-Things & Pedant.

[mattberryman]

When things go wrong in rocketry, there's usually one result… a Rapid Unplannned Disassembly!

Regardless of this initial failure, I'm still so excited with SpaceX's attempts to re-land the first stage of one of their boosters. I'm really looking forward to seeing how they get on with their second attempt in a couple of weeks' time.

[mattberryman]

Resetting the score

Another superb piece by, the ever-excellent, Ben Evans, drawing parallels between the introduction of the iPhone and the eventual loss of British Naval supremacy.

Sometimes, an entire industry gets reset to zero, and all the entrenched advantages and parameters go away. The iPhone had that effect, and so did HMS Dreadnought.

The Dreadnought also created a problem. The Royal Navy had been funded since 1889 on the ‘Two Power’ rule — that it would not only be the strongest in the world but that it would also be stronger than the next two largest navies combined. Hence, the day before the Dreadnought was launched it had 32 battleships where Germany had 11 — a huge lead. The day after, it effectively only had one. It had to start again. The naval supremacy question was reset.

This is rather what the iPhone did, to both the mobile business and the entire consumer technology industry. All the existing parameters and entrenched advantages went away and the whole market was reset to zero.

[mattberryman]

NASA's Opportunity: the little rover that wouldn't give up

In a recent interview with Discovery News, John Callas, NASA's Project Manager, spoke about the faults currently being experienced by the Opportunity rover that has been on Mars for over 10 years.

The fact that Opportunity is still producing useful research is an immense credit to the team responsible for its design and build as it was originally planned for a 90 day primary mission. Now, 10 years on, it has travelled almost 26 miles, trundling from crater to crater getting stronger and richer information about how the Martian environment has evolved.

Now, the rover seems to be suffering from 'amnesia' which the team believe is caused by age-related faults in the rover's flash memory. The rover has both volatile and non-volatile memory, and the team noticed that data that should have been written to the non-volatile memory when the rover shut down was no longer present when it awoke the next day. However, over recent months, the impact of this has progressed to such a degree that recently the rover has stopped communicating with Mission Control which is when the team get really nervous.

The team believe that this fault is isolated to one of the seven banks of memory used by the rover, and in the next fortnight, a software patch should be being released that will stop Opportunity from using the fault bank of memory.

The team are very close to the bottom of their current crater (Endeavour) and are hoping that this patch will resolve the issues plaguing the plucky rover and allow it's phenomonal mission to continue.

For more information on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, please visit NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers minisite.

[mattberryman]

Calculating a file's SHA checksum

Just a quick tip today (also known as an aide-memorie for the future me)

If you need to calculate the SHA checksum of a file on a POSIX system, use the shasum function. By default, the function will return the SHA1 hash, but the -a option can be used to specific an algorithm.

For example, to calculate the SHA256 hash of a file, use:

shasum -a256 filename

MD5 hashes can be checked using the md5 function, but you're not relying on MD5 any more, are you?

[mattberryman]

OneDrive delivers unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 subscribers

Microsoft have announced that Office 365 customers will receive unlimited storage in OneDrive.

Today, storage limits just became a thing of the past with Office 365. Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost. We’ve started rolling this out today to Office 365 Home, Personal, and University customers. The roll out will continue over the coming months, so if you want to be one of the very first to get more storage, go here to put yourself at the front of the line.

Source: The OneDrive Blog

That's a very compelling offer given that, in the UK at least, the cost of Office 365 Home is now the same price as Dropbox Pro (which only has 1TB of storage) and you get access to five copies of Office for PC, Mac and mobile devices.

It's also only fractionally more expensive that Google Drive which is currently charging US$ 9.99 + tax each month (equivalent to £7.43) for 1TB of storage. I don't think anyone would argue that the Google Docs are more mature and more feature-rich than the Microsoft Office webapps, but the Office ones have come a long way in a short-time and have an ambitious roadmap ahead of them.

[mattberryman]

Comparison of Cloud Sync Services

BitTorrent have just published an interesting blog post that compares the speed of the BitTorrent Sync, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive. It seems to be a well-planned, clearly documented and replicable experiment and the results are staggering.

BitTorrentSync is over 18 times quicker than Dropbox when syncing a 1.36GB file between two MacBook Pros on the same gigabit LAN.

Since going Paperless, I've trialled several services to keep my digital filing cabinet always online. As privacy concerns have been raised, public services (Dropbox, Google Drive) have lost their appeal. Synology CloudStation has worked very well recently but there are a few niggles with the OS X client software hogging CPU cycles when trying to re-sync the entire archive far too frequently.

I've switched to BitTorrent Sync to keep the archive online between my MacBook Air and iMac. The mobile client also does a great job of pulling changes down to iOS devices.

I chose BitTorrent Sync for the ability to securely, privately and transparently maintain an electronic filing cabinet. Speed wasn't of primary concern, but interesting to see that it is faster than the other services by such a large magniture.

Now, if only Synology would hurry up and release an official package to install this on my DS1513.

[mattberryman]

Credit Suisse's 2014 Global Wealth Report

The Credit Suisse 2014 Global Wealth Report suggests that wealth grew by 8.3% over the last year - it's fastest rate ever and reached a worldwide total of US$263 trillion.

Some quick stats:

The average person is worth US$ 56,000.

If you have $3,560, including any equity in your home, you're in the top half of wealthiest people in the world.

The top ten percent of the wealthiest people hold 87% of the total wealth. To be in the top 10 percentile - you need a net worth of US$ 98,000.

The lower half hold less than 1% of global wealth.

[mattberryman]

On Monday, we announced Universal SSL, enabling HTTPS for all websites using CloudFlare’s Free plan. Universal SSL represents a massive increase in the number of sites we serve over HTTPS—from tens of thousands, to millions. People have asked...

The CloudFlare team report on the computational cost of wide-spread SSL usage following their release of Universal SSL last week. Since then, it has been activated on many sites.

TLDR; Modern CPUs have dedicated instruction sets for AES-NI that has effectively almost entirely removed any additional computational cost from AES encryption.

[mattberryman]

Changes to the World's Three Largest Economies over Two Millennia

“Let's put things into perspective: the world's three biggest economies for the past 2000 years http://t.co/edxZSr1i14”

Interesting comparison from @TheEconomist on how the world's three largest econonmies have changed over the past two millennia.

[mattberryman]

Why Explore Space?

In 1970, Ernst Stuhlinger, Associate Director for Science at NASA, received a letter from a Nun working in Africa asking for an explanation of the enormous cost of the space-programme when there were so many other problems closer to home.

Dear Sister Mary Jucunda:

Your letter was one of many which are reaching me every day, but it has touched me more deeply than all the others because it came so much from the depths of a searching mind and a compassionate heart. I will try to answer your question as best as I possibly can.

First, however, I would like to express my great admiration for you, and for all your many brave sisters, because you are dedicating your lives to the noblest cause of man: help for his fellowmen who are in need.

You asked in your letter how I could suggest the expenditures of billions of dollars for a voyage to Mars, at a time when many children on this Earth are starving to death. I know that you do not expect an answer such as “Oh, I did not know that there are children dying from hunger, but from now on I will desist from any kind of space research until mankind has solved that problem!” In fact, I have known of famined children long before I knew that a voyage to the planet Mars is technically feasible. However, I believe, like many of my friends, that travelling to the Moon and eventually to Mars and to other planets is a venture which we should undertake now, and I even believe that this project, in the long run, will contribute more to the solution of these grave problems we are facing here on Earth than many other potential projects of help which are debated and discussed year after year, and which are so extremely slow in yielding tangible results.

Before trying to describe in more detail how our space program is contributing to the solution of our Earthly problems, I would like to relate briefly a supposedly true story, which may help support the argument. About 400 years ago, there lived a count in a small town in Germany. He was one of the benign counts, and he gave a large part of his income to the poor in his town. This was much appreciated, because poverty was abundant during medieval times, and there were epidemics of the plague which ravaged the country frequently. One day, the count met a strange man. He had a workbench and little laboratory in his house, and he labored hard during the daytime so that he could afford a few hours every evening to work in his laboratory. He ground small lenses from pieces of glass; he mounted the lenses in tubes, and he used these gadgets to look at very small objects. The count was particularly fascinated by the tiny creatures that could be observed with the strong magnification, and which he had never seen before. He invited the man to move with his laboratory to the castle, to become a member of the count’s household, and to devote henceforth all his time to the development and perfection of his optical gadgets as a special employee of the count.

The townspeople, however, became angry when they realized that the count was wasting his money, as they thought, on a stunt without purpose. “We are suffering from this plague,” they said, “while he is paying that man for a useless hobby!” But the count remained firm. “I give you as much as I can afford,” he said, “but I will also support this man and his work, because I know that someday something will come out of it!”

Indeed, something very good came out of this work, and also out of similar work done by others at other places: the microscope. It is well known that the microscope has contributed more than any other invention to the progress of medicine, and that the elimination of the plague and many other contagious diseases from most parts of the world is largely a result of studies which the microscope made possible.

The count, by retaining some of his spending money for research and discovery, contributed far more to the relief of human suffering than he could have contributed by giving all he could possibly spare to his plague-ridden community.

...

via Roger Launius

[mattberryman]

Analogue in a Digital World

I spend much of my life in front of a glowing screen. Far too many hours set at a desk with a laptop open. I love technology and what it enables, but there are times when I need to take a step back and unwind.

To do this, I like to use pen and paper for note taking, thinking and planning.

At school, I was taught to write using a fountain pen. With the shift to digital, and the increased availability of much more practical writing instruments (e.g. Gel pens, ballpoints etc), I can’t believe that many more people will be taught as I was.

As life became busier, I found I didn’t have time for the extra work that use of a fountain pen requires. The need for spare cartridges, the care required not to smudge freshly written prose and, who can forget, all the ink stains on your hands and fingers.

However, as I have shifted almost entirely into the digital world, I found myself spending more wishfully thinking of how I enjoyed using a fountain pen. When I started my new job, I decided that I would make a concerted effort to return to a fountain pen. The next question was what would be my new steed, my new pen. The more research that I did, I learnt more about the massive world of pens, ink, paper and notebooks than I ever thought possible.

After suffering from a bout of chronic indecision, I chose a Lamy 2000 fountain pen. I adore it. I like how it feels in my hand, the ingenious way the clip pivots and the translucent window to check ink reserves is very neat. But, all these pale into insignificance besides the piston filling mechanism. It has been machined so perfectly that it is virtually invisible. The mechanism draws a good amount of ink into the pen and, to be honest, I rarely have to worry about filling it up. Perhaps, the only downside to this pen, is that it sets the bar so very big high, in so many areas that other pens struggle to hold a candle beside it.

This is a problem for me. I am not known for being very faithful to my possessions and am always on the lookout for the next new thing. Starting to listen to the Brad and Myke on the Pen Addict podcast hasn’t helped as they seem to have very similar tastes to me and each episode normally results in a few things being added to my wishlist.

What’s Wrong With Digital Notetaking

As a self-confessed geek, I have tried virtually all of the high tech methods for note taking

iPad Apps (Evernote, Noteability, Noteshelf, GoodNotes) with an Adonit Jot stylus

Typed notes into Evernote and Microsoft OneNote

LiveScribe pens

I really have tried all these but can't anything that is as satisfying, nor as quick or efficient, as using a traditional pen on paper.

I would dearly love all my handwritten notes to be searchable, always on hand and stored securely in the cloud. I can see that it must work for many people but I struggle with inputting notes as quickly or efficiently as on paper. But, I am pretty sure that is not going to stop me trailing every new stylus / iOS app combination that gets released over coming years.

Please help me here. What am I missing? I would love you to set me straight and help me move into the digital world of note-taking, but for the moment, I’m sticking to my notebook and my Lamy 2000 (until I get bored and switch to a different pen)!

[mattberryman]

This is a Customer Announcement.

Yesterday's TechCrunch article about Facebook's acquisition of Instagram many people were worried about how the service is going to change and saying they were going to delete their accounts.

I think now is a good time to remind them that all these aggrieved users chose to use a service at no cost to themselves.

Even the least technically minded people must realise that there are considerable costs involved with providing the Instagram service, so if the users are not paying for it, where is the money coming from?

It has been coming from external investors and VCs: Andreessen Horowitz, Baseline Ventures, Jack Dorsey and Greylock Partners to name but a few. Only last month Instagram were reportedly receiving Series B funding of aroundUS$40M at a $500M valuation.

Prior to the acquisition, Instagram had received almost US$60million of investment so all those VCs must have pretty confident that they would be able to get a decent return.

Clearly, in this case, they backed the right horse. 

Congratulations to all at Instagram; it's always nice when the good guys come out on top. To everyone else, just remember:

if you're not paying for a service, you're not its customers - you're the product.