WeekEnd Feature: Just how useful is all this stuff?

by Ian Thompson, CCSP Staff Editor
Aug 1, 2004

Did you ever wonder just what all this gadgetry was for? I don’t mean which side is on – no, the point is this; a gadget is cool, a gadget is seen by others as desirable – it has intrinsic value – but (shocked silence) is it really that useful? “AAARRGGH! He’s questioned the value of a slinky iPod, or iPAQ, or iXUS” (sorry Canon, but you missed the boat there when you spelt it with a capital ‘I’). Here we go, then…

It shines, it delights

Firstly, let me get one thing straight – I love gadgets. I’ve got an iPAQ, my sister’s got a blue iPod-Mini (as well as a nice shiny red MINI) and the other day I was soooo very close to ticking the box on Amazon that would have gently wafted a Digital IXUS 500 my way, but I was having some trouble finding just the right CF card – no-one had either a 1GB or even a 512MB Lexar 40x Pro for sale anywhere this side of the pond (the standard 32MB just ain’t enough at 5 mega-pixels).

What is it with capitalisation these days? MINI’s a brand, mini’s just tiny; i-Anything is probably registered to Apple and you’d better not mention KaZaA…

Oh well. No, what set me off this week was an old article I dug up in the home-office, by which I of course mean ‘cluttered hovel’ – I haven’t seen half of the floor for a good few years now, and thank God that IKEA ( ;¬D ) units are modular. You see, some things are just more useful than others – there’s a Toyota advert out on TV where the voice-over guy drawls on about how we just go about taking the most reliable things in our lives for granted. The implication is that we only ever really notice something when it breaks, so hopefully I’ll not be noticing this PC as much as I used to – yes folks, I’ve finally switched to Windows XP.

Linux I’ve had for a couple of years now, so I haven’t exactly been without a reliable OS, but I needed to run Office 2003 and I had to move my dual-boot PC on from Win98 because of this. We’re working on something at school that should pull together several heavy weight databases in a more useful manner, so I guess that this means we’re actually creating a shiny new, easy-on-the-eye desktop for our intranet. Hope it doesn’t break…

Where in the world?

When is a gadget no longer a gadget? Answer: when it’s used seriously. One gadget that spans both the ‘nice-to-have’ brigade and the ‘essential user’ crowd is GPS.

I have a colleague who bought an iPAQ-based in-car GPS that uses software by TomTom. It looks good, sat in its cradle in his BMW, but he lives about 10 minutes away and hasn’t really got beyond the ‘nice toy’ stage. It’s one of those ones that shows the road ahead in 3D and it talks to the driver in a choice of voices. Honestly, there is a choice – I know that most of the time (when it’s in use rather than sat in his desk drawer) it ends up on ‘Call-girl’, but all those other bits and pieces mean one thing – it needs a huge amount of RAM and can’t go more than about 8 hours without seeing a power socket.

Not the tool of choice for the crew of a yacht racing across the Southern Ocean, then. Or the mountain rescue team fighting to reach base camp 20,000ft up in the Himalayas.

Instead, these intrepid types always go for something by Magellan or Garmin. Far simpler, with just the basics on a monochrome screen (or 16-greys if you ask nice) – compass, time, longitude and latitude, maybe elevation and good accuracy if it’s a bit fancy, all in something that’s about the size of a cellphone and slightly more robust than the average PDA.

Draw a line in the sand

So, assuming you’ve bought a GPS that can actually leave the car, and you’ve done with rescuing errant ramblers in the forest, what do you do with it?

In a word: Confluence!
What’s a confluence? Well, it’s a point on the earth’s surface where the lines of longitude and latitude cross. There are plenty to be going on with – 360x360=129,600, but most are on the ocean. Take a trip over to the Degree Confluence Project and see what I mean – they’ve whittled that down to around 16,000 that we can walk to within 100m and take a photo, and there’s just under 13,000 left – hurry!

I suppose you could charter a boat and just take random photos of the ocean, but to prevent anyone from racking up a huge number this way, at least one of the photos of the confluence must show the GPS screen clearly enough to validate the confluence. Still, since you’re never more than 49 miles form one (apparently) then there’s no excuse!. Then again, most of the ones very close to the North and South poles are also excluded – 90 in one footstep, at the points where all lines meet and set off again, and probably a few thousand within the Antarctic continental area alone. That’s the funny thing about living on a globe, where some points are closer together than others.

There’s one about 20 miles from me, just north of York, but given that countries are funny shapes it’s the only one hereabouts – the ones either side are in the North Sea or Morecambe Bay, and the one below that particular one is near Beddgelert, North Wales (I have been there and it is reasonably dry…). I’ve probably driven past the one above it, in southern Scotland.

Throw me a line here

So how come we aren’t all aware of the nearest confluence? Well, it’s a highly unlikely to be signposted, so we won’t be all driving our super-reliable Toyota Corollas there, no longer cursing the laptop PC from crashing all the time (that would be us in the car, if we’re watching the screen too much).

On the other hand, it’s not all about a bunch of hippie tree-huggers – far from it. I’ll leave you to take a look at some of the comments written to accompany the photos and you’ll see that this is a bunch of people who pretty much represent us all.

Get out a bit

Having spent the best part of the past 36 hours sat here, I can certainly do with a spot of fresh air, but I’m not about to go careening about the place trying to stand on an arbitrary spot on the earth’s surface whose only claim to fame is that is bears some sort of mathematical link to a line ‘drawn’ centuries ago. Instead, I’ve got a whole new set of concerns in terms of security.

Without doubt, Windows XP is about the single most attacked OS going. I’ve moved from being relatively happy with my old Win98 setup – the usual paranoid array of tools and trinkets designed to keep the world at bay – to a whole new way of thinking. This may not be ground-breaking news to most of you – after all, XP’s been out for three years now – but any sort of upheaval in a system is bound to expose a few chinks in the armour.

For example, have you tried XP SP2 yet? Especially if you’ve an AMD processor… I thought I recognised that strained voice. There are more lock-downs and shut doors now than ever before, which is no bad thing, but when you’ve got to go through several levels to set firewall options, then along another route entirely to set permissions to use the email system for each program that may auto-submit, it becomes tedious.

Most people will get a PC ready-configured, so this will not be an issue. Many more will just not use the ‘offending’ tool (which could be an AV or AT program). Some will look for a utility that will make the whole process more smooth (unless, that is, MS tweak this in the final release). And how much more different will a malicious program look that’s designed to do the same?

Perhaps this is leading us all down a new avenue…