Edge Case, Community Builder, Tinkerer, and Teacher
Won’t be using this as my avatar, probably, but all the cool kids have been making these, so I had to jump on the bandwagon. Darn that condition I have - FOMO - Fear of Missing Out! 
Now that I think of it, it doesn’t look particularly manga-ish, but oh well.
At the Intel SIGGRAPH booth, I ran into something unexpected at the Intel Software Network kiosk - a brand new (just announced this week) Lenovo ThinkPad W700.
Besides being quite big (you can see it’s about to swallow my bestickered MacBook Pro whole), this Centrino 2-based monster’s claim to fame is the integrated Wacom drawing tablet in the wristrest.
The specs are extremely impressive, too: 17″ WUXGA (1920×1280) display, Intel Core 2 Extreme quad core 3.0GHz CPU, up to 8GB of RAM, an NVIDIA GPU with 1GB of RAM, and two hard drive bays for RAID 0 or RAID 1. This is pretty much the fastest portable on the planet.
Perfect for artists, webcomic creators, Photoshop junkies, and anyone else who doesn’t want to lug their external drawing tablet around. Instead, you can just lug the W700 around, because it’s a stretch to even call this bad boy a “laptop”. 
I think this system has officially claimed the title of “Lapzilla” from the 17″ MacBook Pro. Saw some more of it at the Lenovo booth, and there’s no other way to describe it other than “monster”.
Oh, and for reference, prices start at around $2900.
That price, however, doesn’t include much. Only a Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, lower resolution screen, no Wacom tablet, 512MB VRAM, etc.
Maxed out with all the goodies (Quad core processor - $875, WUXGA screen - $225, 4GB RAM - $170, Wacom tablet and Pantone color corrector - $150, 1GB VRAM - $400, 2 fast hard drives in RAID 0 - $435, and a Blu-Ray drive - $450 inflates the price up to a whopping $5500. And that doesn’t even include the even more spendy option for a pair of fast SATA 64GB SSD drives (which you can’t apparently RAID together), which would add another $2000+ to the price. Yikes. I guess the size isn’t the only “monster” thing about the W700.
Update: Here are a couple more photos, of the monster W700 trying to eat my little 8.9″ Eee PC 901.
I’m at the SIGGRAPH 2008 conference in Los Angeles this week. My group, Intel Software Network, has a lot of cool stuff going on this week around the recent paper that was published on the Larrabee architecture.
I can’t shake the feeling that the Larrabee Architecture paper that was just published by the ACM, written mostly by Intel engineers, is one of those landmark events in computing. I’m really not trying to add to the hype that’s already surrounding Larrabee. There’s enough of that already. But it really is going to be a huge leap in computing. Imagine that in a couple of years, instead of having one, or two, or maybe four cores, your computer could have a Larrabee card with 24 or 32 (I’m guessing - this number isn’t final) programmable x86 cores that can be set to any task that benefits from massive parallelism (like, say, making that 3D game you’re playing look REALLY pretty and smooth), along with 8 “bigger” traditional Nehalem (I mean, Core i7) processor cores that do the things your current single or dual core processor does. Oh, and with Hyperthreading, all of those cores can run more than one thread, which makes them appear as even more “virtual” processors to the operating and software that use them.
How in the world are operating systems, applications, and games going to have to change to deal with this massive shift to many cores and many threads?
I’ll be posting more, and helping to get some videos of the cool stuff here at SIGGRAPH posted quickly to ISN’s video site, Take Five, so keep any eye out over there for any cool stuff I come across.
It’s things like this that make me love my job!
Living in Portland, we frequently visit the Oregon Coast (at least once or twice a year). It’s only about an hour’s drive away, and it’s breathtakingly beautiful. Some of our favorite places to go are Tillamook (the cheese and ice cream factory!), Cannon Beach (Mo’s and Tolovana Park are great, as is Ecola State Park), Seaside (kitschy promenade, etc.), Lincoln City, and Newport. There are tons of really nice little towns along the coast, too. Honestly, my favorite coast activity is just driving Highway 101 - the road is fun, and the scenery is out of this world.
We took a little family vacation to the coast last weekend, and of course, I can’t turn off my geeky parts (though I did leave the laptop at home - a first for me!). So I was paying attention to what kind of cell phone data coverage I was seeing, whether it was 3G or not, and what kind of speeds I was getting. I had three devices with me to test: my iPhone 3G, my wife Rachel’s original iPhone, and my Amazon Kindle, with it’s cellular “Whispernet” radio that works on Sprint’s EVDO data network.
In the past, cell phone coverage (even for voice) was spotty. You were probably OK if you were in one of the big towns, but outside that, you were out of luck. Data coverage was slow and spotty. Things have improved greatly in the last few years, and the one impression I got from this trip was that not only has cell coverage in general gotten MUCH better on the Oregon coast, 3G has arrived in a big way. It was really nice to be able to stay connected so well.
First, the iPhones on AT&T’s network. When they first started rolling out 3G (before the iPhone), the fast HSDPA data service was only available in 20 or so major metro areas. Cities like Portland and Seattle were covered, but not the towns in between, and not at the coast. AT&T has been building out it’s 3G network at an aggressive rate - no doubt in part because of the iPhone 3G. This weekend, except for localized “dead spots” (like our hotel room, in a deep hollow and right on the beach), where I didn’t have much signal at all, I had great AT&T 3G HSDPA coverage in all of the towns we stopped in: Seaside, Cannon Beach, Tillamook, Lincoln City, and Newport. I did some speed tests in a few places, and averaged roughly 600Kbps - about the same I get in the Portland suburbs.
I also did a few tests on my Kindle. I honestly wasn’t expecting much coverage, but I was pleasantly surprised. In the places I checked (mostly in Lincoln City, where we were staying), I had 4 or 5 bars of EVDO signal, and while I didn’t do any speed tests, it felt just as zippy as anywhere else I’ve used it. Which was great, because I really, REALLY needed to download the book Breaking Dawn (book 4 in the Twilight teen vampire saga - guilty pleasure!) the instant it became available at midnight EST on Saturday night. At 9:02PM PST, I made the purchase, and less than a minute later, I started reading (the book is EXCELLENT, by the way! - Affiliate links to the hardcover and Kindle editions).
So, it’s nice to see that the cell carriers (well, AT&T and Sprint, at least) are improving their coverage on the Oregon Coast. Now I can count on staying connected when I’m there, and a few people have asked me about my experiences with coverage there, so hopefully they’ll find this post through Google or however, and get their questions answered.
Maybe next time I’ll have more time to sit and read or surf or whatever - we took our two kids, Emma (5) and Gabe (almost 2), so this wasn’t exactly a “sit around and relax” kind of vacation. In fact, now that we’re home, I feel like I need ANOTHER vacation to recover.
I’ve been here, but haven’t posted in way too long. I was at OSCON - the O’Reilly Open Source Convention - all last week. It was here in Portland, and it was an awesome experience - I learned a ton, saw lots of people I know from the open source communities, and met lots of new people. I LOVE the open source community and the people involved, and I had an absolute blast. OSCON is one of my favorite conferences.
I took a slightly different approach to “covering” the conference this time. Instead of breathless live blogging/tweeting, I decided to pay more attention, and take lots of notes and writing down my ideas in a real, paper notebook. As I mentioned on Twitter, I’ve got enough notes and ideas for a month worth of writing. Nice, good, juicy blog posts.
So what happened? Why so quiet?
This week at work has been crazy. Besides all the email and stuff that piled up while I was at OSCON, it just seemed to be one of those weeks where my days filled up with meetings, and I just didn’t find any time to sit down, gather my thoughts, organize my ideas, and get something written.
Now, I’m headed out for a short vacation with the family to the Oregon Coast this weekend (so I probably won’t get too much writing done there, either). But I’m dying to get these ideas out of my head and my notebook and out there into the world, so we can talk about them all.
So, sorry it’s been quiet around here, and hopefully, next week, I’ll make up for it.
It’s late, and I’ll write more when I’ve played with it more, but one of the apps I’ve dreamed of for a long time finally came out - WordPress for iPhone!
iphone.wordpress.org
I noticed today that DSL Reports has given a very nice makeover to their iPhone Speed Test page.
It used to be a bare white page, with teeny tiny little text and buttons at the top, that you had to zoom/spread with your fingers before you could even tap them.
This is much better, plus now there are more options for how you’re connected (GPRS, EDGE, 3G, or Wifi, where before there was only “Mobile” and “High Speed”). Plus now you can see what speeds other people are seeing on each network/connection method, and know how you stack up (nothing like an internet measuring content to bolster/shatter your self esteem!).
A great overhaul to a tool that I use all the time, just to see what kind of speeds I can get at various places on AT&T’s 3G network (this screenshot was taken near Cornelius Pass Rd and Highway 26 in Hillsboro).
Definitely worth a bookmark.
Just in case you were wondering, the Amazon Kindle can charge over USB. I know I wondered, before I bought mine, and lots of people have asked me since I got it. So here’s the proof - that little orange LED next to the USB cable is the charge indicator light. It’s plugged in to my MacBook Pro. It’s probably slower than charging from the brick, but at least it works.
I really like this because it means when I travel, I can go with one less proprietary power brick/charger cable, since a lot of my gadgets can charge from a USB power brick (and many also share the same standard mini USB cable, like the one the Kindle uses).
Posting for posterity, Google, and future reference.
I’m working this afternoon from the new Hillsboro Library (on Brookwood, across from the Hillsboro Airport and Intel Jones Farm). First time I’ve been here, though Rachel and the kids come all the time.
This place is NICE. Tons of tables (each with a lamp with a power outlet in the base, to cater to laptops), fast wifi (about 7Mbps down/1Mbps up), a gorgeous view of the park/pond outside (with real live geese!).
Plus the intangible geeky coolness of being surrounded by books, words, thoughts, and knowledge. Even though I’m not a big dead tree fan (you can see my Kindle in the picture, but also the moleskine notebook I also keep with me at all times - Kindle in the left cargo pants pocket, moleskine in the right), I love what libraries represent, and I don’t spend near enough time in them.
I came here today to get some quiet time to work on some things that require concentration, free from distractions (which is hard to do in the Workplace of the Future at Intel’s new JF1 offices, where I sit), but I can see myself coming and hanging out/working here a LOT more in the future.
Yay for libraries!
Charlene Li, late of Forrester Research, co-author of the book Groundswell, and all around social media rock star, is going to be in Portland tomrrow night, and she wants to have a drink with you.
We’re having a “tweetup” at the bar in the Governor Hotel in Portland, starting at 8:30PM on Wednesday night, July 16. Charlene says if you bring your copy of Groundswell, she’ll sign it, and buy you a drink.
You can get the details on Upcoming (you can RSVP if you want, but this is way informal, so no guarantees, of course - it’s a bunch of people descending on a hotel bar). You can also see what the Twittersphere is saying about Charlene, the tweetup, and Groundswell on the spanking new search.twitter.com (formerly Summize, a.k.a. the best dang Twitter search engine out there, period). You know, in case you want to see if any of your friends are going to be there.
Hope you can make it!
Update: Bummer. Charlene’s flight got cancelled, and she’s not going to get into PDX until around midnight, so we had to cancel the tweetup. Sorry! 
You can see go see Charlene speak at the Internet Strategy Forum Summit tomorrow (Thursday), though.
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