"Revolution" TV Show.

This entry is some thoughts about the new television series "Revolution."  This latest invention from the imagination of "Lost" creator J.J. Abrams premiered Monday, September 17th, on NBC.  The pilot episode was released early on Hulu, so I took a look at it.  I'll try to write this entry without spoilers, or at least without any more spoilers than the ads and website for the show provide.  Still, if you prefer to avoid even a hint of fore-knowledge, you may want to read this after you watch the pilot episode.

"Revolution" is set "fifteen years after the blackout."  In a video on the show's website, Abrams says, “The question the show asks is, 'What would happen if everything powered by electricity suddenly turned off?'” Because I'm interested in worst-case scenarios, disaster preparedness, and knowing what to do when the zombies come, I'm intrigued by ideas like this.  But this a problematic scenario...  People are really ingenious and given the proper motivation (say, the loss of civilization as we know it), they would come up with some pretty clever stuff.  Let's consider how...

While it's true that we use electricity for an enormous number of things, we can still do a lot without it, as we did in the past.  Energy can be harvested mechanically in the form of movement, with windmills and water wheels or water turbines. In 1890, George Westinghouse suggested that the energy of Niagara Falls would best be transmitted to Buffalo not as electricity generated on site, but as compressed air. Compressed air can also be used to store mechanical energy in high-pressure gas cylinders.

Furthermore, a lot of technologies that we think of as “electrical” don't have to be. In many cases, we use electricity to provide mechanical energy that could be provided by other sources. Refrigeration, for example, uses electricity to turn a motor to run a compressor. But there's no reason the compressor can't be turned by a water wheel or a windmill. Or a steam engine...

In the event of a “Revolution” scale blackout, the world would quickly see the return of the steam era. Boiler technology and steam engines would be the next big growth industry. Coal and wood fired steam railroads would quickly provide critical transportation links, first on a small scale as museum exhibits were pressed back into service, but then growing as fast as more equipment could be built. Central steam engines in factories could provide mechanical energy for all sorts of tasks, such as machining, cooling, cutting, building, and so on.

And if the “Revolution” world really just precludes electronics, it wouldn't be limited to steam engines. Diesel engines use the compression of the piston to ignite the fuel-air mixture, without any electrical spark plug. And they can be built to be started using only compressed air. It may take a lot of tedious pumping, but you could prime a compressed air system with a hand or foot pump. Then, once you've got the engine running, you could use it to drive a compressor to charge up the compressed air cylinder for the next time you need to start.  All without electricity. Virtually all large scale modern engines are highly dependent upon electronic engine control modules  (ECMs) to manage every aspect of their operation. But that's in order to make them as efficient as possible. You can trade away some of that efficiency for a much simpler, all mechanical control system. That's how they all used to be. And there would be enormous motivation for people to return to and advance these sorts of technologies.

Refrigeration also illustrates the case where the current state of the art is only one of many ways to achieve the desired goal, in this case of making things cold. Anyone with a propane fueled refrigerator in their camper knows that you can keep a fridge full of food or drinks cold just fine using a small flame to drive an absorption refrigeration cycle.

A permanent loss of electricity would limit the production of some materials. Aluminum, for example, is refined using an electrolytic process, without which, it is becomes a very precious metal. Fortunately, there is already a significant stock of metallic aluminum in the world that could be recycled almost endlessly. But anything that depends on an electrolytic manufacturing process could no longer be made.

Otherwise, I can think of only a few key technologies that would be impossible to at least approximate in a “Revolution” world: high-speed computing and high-speed, long-distance, and wireless communication. And even some level of both computation and communication can be done mechanically. Mechanical calculators existed for years before modern electronic logic circuits, and I'm sure the world would see new heights of sophisticated mechanical computers being built. It would be a steam-punk enthusiast's dream come true. I can also imagine a telegraph system based on mechanical modulation of something like a metal bar, in order to send messages significant distances at the speed of sound in metal, or around 13,000 miles per hour. Or perhaps we'd just see the return of other pre-electronic communication technologies.  Sure, neither of these are as good as what we have now, but they are still a major step above the pre-industrial, agrarian civilization portrayed in the show...

T-Mobile Customer Service Fail

I was in Seattle recently, helping work an event booth at the Bite of Seattle, and we needed to upload a bunch of photos.  The available free WiFi options were pretty poor, so we purchased a T-Mobile wireless hot spot. They offer high performance network connectivity, and contract-free data plans that can be purchased or re-charged easily.  As in so many situations, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Once we got the hot-spot set up, we had network connectivity but it was insanely slow.  I put my phone in airplane mode and connected only it to the hotspot, then ran the SpeedTest.net app, and got 13 kbit/sec down, and 9 kbit/sec up.  That works out to 2.96 hours to upload each photo.  Obviously, that was not suitable.  At other times, I did get somewhat better performance.  When I thought to get a screen capture (Thank you, Ice Cream Sandwich!) it was up to 31kbit/sec.  Now each upload would be slightly less than an hour!

Rather than throw more time and effort down this particular rat hole, I decided to take the easiest of consumer outs and just return the product that clearly didn't meet any reasonable user expectation.  At my local T-Mobile store here in Santa Clara they gave me a prompt and courteous refund of the purchase of the hot spot, and didn't even try to ding me for the $25 restocking fee they warned of when I purchased it.  But they wouldn't refund the $35 for the useless 3GB data plan at which I had barely sipped.  For that, they said, I would have to call T-Mobile Customer Service.

What followed was a customer service experience surpassed in badness only by the U.S. Postal Service.  The Postal Service was worse only because the folks at T-Mobile pretended to care about my annoyance.  Over half an hour on the phone I was transferred from tech support, to customer care, to prepaid refill, to payments, to refunds.  Although T-Mobile runs the network, conveys the data, tracks the usage, and can recharge the account when needed, they had no mechanism to verify (and thus refund) the 3GB data plan purchase I had made.

At the end, they said that I would have to go to the T-Mobile store where I purchased the plan to get a refund.  That, I pointed out, was in Seattle.  Well, then, I'd have to go to a local T-Mobile store.  That, I pointed out, was who sent me to call them.  Ultimately, they won, in that I gave up, and decided to instead just tell them they suck, and expense the $35 rip-off.  I will yet contest the charge on my credit card, since they didn't actually provide the service I paid for.  Even then, I may or may not get my money back.  At least the Post Office eventually gave me a refund in stamps...

Not particularly...

As part of my ongoing rant about of bad UI, I thought this was worthy of note:

The word "help" or "helpful" occurs ten times in this dialog box, all to tell me why it can't help me.

And no, I did not find this particularly helpful...

Sticky and annoying...

I've griped about other UI goofiness in Skype elsewhere, but below is an example of a behavior of which far too many programs are guilty: the sneak attack checkbox.  I generally recharge my Skype balance whenever it gets below about $10, but I only want to do so manually.  That way, my potential down-side is limited.  If auto-recharge is on, and I unknowingly do something expensive, it could just keep drawing down my PayPal account.  If auto-recharge is off, my Skype balance will just go to zero, and whatever I'm doing wrong will stop happening and the problem will come to my attention because Skype has broken.  Except, every time I recharge my Skype credit, they pre-check the "here, let me turn auto-recharge on for you" box:

This is irritating for at least 3 reasons:

1. Things that can cost you should, in my opinion, default to off and require an affirmative selection, at least the first time if not always.
2. They are intentionally setting this to the state they want, not the state that they know I have selected every previous time I've gone through this process.
3. The placement, size, and layout of the checkbox dialog is not such that it leaps out at you.  I have overlooked it at least once, and the had to go into my account control to figure out how to turn it off again.

Now, I understand perfectly well why they do it.  Getting someone to subscribe for automatic payments makes giving them more money the default case.  Health clubs and AOL have built entire business models around making it easier to give them money than to stop.  But it is annoying and an abuse of the good will of the user / client, and we deserve better.

Droid Razr Touch Screen Noise

Last month I got a new cell phone to replace my first generation Motorola Droid.  I decided to get the Droid Razr, another Motorola product, and I've been generally happy with it.  Some of the features just seem nuts to have in a cell phone, like HDMI output, and yet I've used it to watch a movie on a hotel TV.

One interesting sensitivity that I noticed today was that the touch screen keyboard became almost unusable while I had the Razr plugged into a wall charger.  I have been using the "Swype" mode, which allows you to enter entire words as a smooth sweeping gesture around the keyboard.  This time, though, it was detecting finger-lifts when I was still touching the screen, and the path it showed as where I was moving my finger looked like I'd had way too much caffeine.

Now admittedly, I was not using the charger that came with the phone, but it was the Motorola charger from my first Droid.  That's the charger that I usually have in my backpack, and I have actually had occasion to look at the 5V coming out of it with an oscilloscope.  It very clean and well regulated, even under load, especially compared to many other third-party chargers.  On a hunch, though, I unplugged the charger, and suddenly the keyboard worked fine again.  This may merit some further laboratory investigation, and it might provide good justification for building a controllable noise injection circuit...

How To Post To Blogger Via E-Mail

If you have a blogger.com hosted blog account that you want to post to via e-mail, just log into your dashboard, and click on the "Settings" tab.  Then go to the "Email & Mobile" sub-tab underneath that.  Under "Posting Options" (the third major item down) you will find "Email Posting Address."  Fill in the box, and then select whether you want e-mailed posts to be posted immediately or saved as drafts.  Voila!

Then, once you're done with that, you might want to e-mail a test posting.  Something brief, perhaps, like quick instructions on how to post via e-mail...

China Travelogue - The Great Firewall of China

As my cousin Stacy pointed out last week, I have missed my deadline.  I had set the goal of posting at least once a week here for the next year, and then only a few weeks in I missed that goal.  The cause of my shortcoming is a combination of Chinese totalitarianism and my shortsightedness.

I’ve just spent two weeks in China on a business trip.  Although I was aware of “The Great Firewall of China,” this is the first trip where it has completely thwarted my efforts.  “The Great Firewall” is the wholesale, systematic censorship of Internet access within the People’s Republic of China.  From inside China, it appears that a large number of common websites just don’t work.  Attempts to connect to them result in a “connection reset” message, or sometimes the connection simply times out with no response at all.  One of the sites so blocked is blogger.com, where I write this blog.

Reset connection to blogger.com

Timed-out connection to Facebook

There are some ways around The Great Firewall.  Virtual Private Networks or “VPNs” can be used to create an encrypted tunnel between a computer inside the PRC and a portal on the outside, through which (virtually) all network traffic can be passed.  From the user’s point of view, it is like browsing from the far end of the VPN.  There are a few problems with this solution.  The first is speed and bandwidth.  If I have a VPN connection to my home, and I request data from a website, that data has to both go into my home machine, which is limited by my home download speed, and then be sent to me out of  my home over the VPN, which is limited by my home upload speed.  There is also some delay introduced for the VPN server at my home to encrypt the data for transfer over the VPN.  All the traffic passing through the VPN has to traverse the network connection to the VPN server twice.  This can, of course, be overcome by using a fast machine with a really high bandwidth Internet connection, but it still represents a bottleneck.

There are also some more technical VPN issues.  If I’m connected to the Internet at my hotel in China, I need to make sure that the packets required to maintain that local connection to the hotel’s network aren’t shipped out over the VPN.  For example, DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is used to get an IP address in most public networks.  It is also used to renew that address when it expires.  If that traffic isn’t left on the local network, then the Internet connection required for the VPN can’t be set up in the first place.

Another work-around is web proxies.  These are similar to VPNs, in that you send your request for a web-page to a server somewhere else, that that server, acting as your “proxy,” requests the web page and forwards it on to you.  That way, the routers filtering traffic from certain sites don’t know where your traffic is originating and let it through unmolested.  There are many free web proxies, but most of them don’t work terribly well, although it wasn’t clear to me if they are simply overloaded, or if China is doing a really good job of blocking them as quickly as the pop up.

To access some static web content you can use a search engine as your proxy.  Microsoft’s “Bing” works pretty well in China, and in several cases I was able to search for some content I wanted to see, and even though those pages were blocked, I could download the cached data from Bing.  This only works for web content that is relatively static, and non-interactive.  And while I could access the Bing cached pages, the Google cache did not seem to work.

It turns out that there is also a way to set up blogger to post anything mailed to a pre-arranged e-mail address.  Since I didn’t set that up ahead of time (my aforementioned shortsightedness), I couldn’t use that on this trip.

So why does China go to the expense and effort of maintaining The Great Firewall?  I think the pretense is to block “objectionable content” from the people of the People’s Republic.  It seems obvious to me that it is an effort to manage the flow of information and control the mindset and mood of the populous.  Above and beyond that, though, there also seems to be some element of supporting SOE’s (State Owned Enterprises) over their foreign competitors.  Although China apparently has a booming social networking industry, Facebook is blocked.  I would love to see the World Trade Organization, which China was so hot to join ten years ago, take a look at this aspect of it.


On future trips, I’ll know to set up more infrastructure in advance.  But for now I’m just happy to be back on the right side of the Great Firewall.