Living in the Cloud

In June 2008 I announced I was writing a book. The working title is 'Living in the Cloud'. It is a book intended to help people understand computers, the internet and other technology they use every day. I plan to have the book finished by the end of 2008, and will post excerpts as I write them for feedback and criticism. The following is one such excerpt:

Free Samples

With their ability to work through millions of ones and zeros per second, microprocessors opened up new possibilities for putting the binary system to use. We've already seen how ones and zeros are used to produce text, but what about the sounds, images and movement we experience on computers and other digital devices? These are all created using the binary system too.

Although computers are machines, they share a similar design philosophy with nature in that big things are made up of lots of little things put together in different ways. Everything in nature, no matter how complicated, can be traced back to its component atoms. From simple building blocks there are infinite possibilities. Creation is a matter of finding patterns and sequences that work. Digital technology works by breaking something into its smallest parts and then reconstructing it as a whole.

I will try to explain how this occurs in the simplest language I can while staying as accurate as possible. If it gets a little technical don’t be too concerned. It isn’t vital to understand the inner workings of a computer to use one, but it’s surprisingly helpful and does wonders for self-confidence.

Consider sound, which is caused by vibrations through the air or other substances at frequencies which we can hear. Sound is analogue - it is a continuous signal. A music CD is digital - it is a sequence of numbers. How is it possible to take sound waves out of the air and translate them to a piece of plastic and metal that plays music when you put it in a CD player?

The answer is a process called sampling. To explain in simple terms - a microphone listens to the continuous sound waves (called the waveform) and records the audio frequency at regular intervals, creating a flow of numbered values, which, if played back in the right order through a speaker, will reproduce the original sound. The microphone is literally taking samples of the sound. The number of samples it takes each second is called the sampling rate. Although the result will never be as pure as the original waveform, if enough samples are taken, the difference should be imperceptible to the human ear.

Here is a diagram of the digital audio process:

[click to continue...]

In June 2008 I announced I was writing a book. The working title is 'Living in the Cloud'. It is a book intended to help people understand computers, the internet and other technology they use every day. I plan to have the book finished by the end of 2008, and will post excerpts as I write them for feedback and criticism. The following is one such excerpt:

Character Study

So how do all those ones and zeroes translate into words on a computer screen?

By the 1960s, the Morse Code telegraph system, developed over 100 years previously, had evolved considerably. A system of Telex machines and other teleprinting devices was in full swing, transmitting news, government information and personal messages across countries and the globe. All of these devices used the binary system in the form of perforated paper tape with holes punched in.

It wasn't Morse Code being used by these machines, however. As telegraphic transmission became more common, people had been looking for ways to automate the sending and receiving of telegraphs, which led to the development of new code lists, which included binary sequences not only for the usual A-Z, 0-9 and various punctuation marks, but also special sequences that would tell the machines that read them to start or stop sending, begin a new line, start a new page or various other behaviours.

In 1963 one new such code was introduced and quickly became adopted as the standard system. Called the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII, it assigned a character, (a letter, number, symbol or instruction) for each binary number from 0-127, making a total of 128 possible characters. 95 of these were printable characters such as letters, numbers, punctuation marks and symbols, while the other 33 were non-printable instructions called control characters.

Click here to view an ASCII chart which shows the 128 different characters and their binary values.

In the binary system, each one or zero is referred to as a Binary digIT, which is in turn referred to as a bit. To cover all the numbers from 0-127, each character in the ASCII chart needed up to seven ones and zeros (7 bits) to write. [click to continue...]

In June 2008 I announced I was writing a book. The working title is 'Living in the Cloud'. It is a book intended to help people understand computers, the internet and other technology they use every day. I plan to have the book finished by the end of 2008, and will post excerpts as I write them for feedback and criticism. The following is one such excerpt:

2 + 2 = 100

Maths these days has largely been outsourced to computers, simply because they are so much better and faster at it, though after waiting for a few minutes while the shop assistant finds a calculator so she can work out what 10% off $100 is you might wonder if that is such a good idea. Nevertheless, for better or worse, so it goes. However, as is the case when outsourcing important work to anyone, it helps to know just enough about how to do it yourself so you can tell if your subcontractor is doing a good job.

Despite the fact computers can only understand ones and zeros, counting in binary isn't as complicated as you might think, though it can take a while for many people to wrap their heads around it at first. While we can all agree that 0 = 0 and 1 = 1, what does 2 look like in binary? Actually, it's 10. Here's how it works:

Our everyday system of decimal numbers is called a Base Ten system. That's because we have ten different numerals from 0-9. When we count, we run through these numerals one at a time until we hit 9, then we go back to 0 and put a 1 on the front. If we keep counting, we'll get to 19 then go back to 0 again and change the 1 to a 2. When we get all the way to 99, we simply go back to 00 and put another 1 on the front to get 100.

Binary is a Base Two system and it works exactly the same way. First 0, then 1. At this point we have already exhausted all our possibilities for numerals, just like when we reach 9 in the decimal system. That means our next move is back to zero and a new column in front. Therefore, in binary, 1 = 1 but 2 = 10. After that, 3 = 11 and 4 = 100.

Another way to look at it is in columns. The column furthest to the right in the decimal system is for single numbers (also called units) from 1-9. The next column is for tens, then hundreds, thousands and so on. If you think about it, each column is 10x the column before it. 100 is 10 x 10 and 10,000 is 10 x 1,000. This is because decimal is a Base Ten system. When we write the number 16 for example, what we are really saying is there is 1 ten and 6 units.

Since binary is a Base Two system, instead of tens, hundreds and thousands, each column represents 2x the column before it, so we end up with units, twos, fours, eights, sixteens and so on. Using the same example, that means instead of saying there is 1 ten and 6 units, we would say there is 1 sixteen and nothing left after that.

[click to continue...]

In June 2008 I announced I was writing a book. The working title is 'Living in the Cloud'. It is a book intended to help people understand computers, the internet and other technology they use every day. I plan to have the book finished by the end of 2008, and will post excerpts as I write them for feedback and criticism. The following is one such excerpt:

Between Something and Nothing

There was silence. Heavy and expectant. The silence of someone waiting for a sound, a signal. Then it came. A flurry of high-pitched blips, some meaning intended within a pattern of seemingly random noise, and then silence again. A quick translation of the code revealed the message - 'What hath God wrought?'

These were the words that marked the official opening of the telegraph line used for Morse Code in 1844. It is perhaps fitting that they were taken from a biblical verse in the Book of Numbers, for numbers are the very heart and soul of computers. Two numbers, in fact, which in turn represent an idea which has been crucial to the evolution of humankind since we first discovered the need to count. The difference between something and nothing.

All human meaning exists somewhere in the world between something and nothing. The art of computing is simply a way of creating meaning out of both. Morse Code was developed as a way to communicate over distance. It created meaning in the form of embossed dots and dashes on a strip of paper. A 'computer' at that time referred to the person who translated the dots and dashes into everyday language. Computers as we know them today may be only a relatively recent phenomenon, but the rules by which they operate are as old as civilisation itself.

5,000 years ago, the Sumerians used two wedges pressed into a wet lump of clay to represent the idea of zero. They had become tired of dreaming up new symbols for numbers and had worked out that by making the position of the numbers important, you could change their meaning. The same symbol for 3 in one column could mean 30, 300 or even 3,000 in a different column. The problem was how could you tell which column it was meant to be in without another symbol to mark its place? A symbol that literally meant nothing could mean everything. And so zero was born.

Nothing is everything when it comes to computers and indeed mathematics itself. Signalling in Morse Code using a flashlight, meaning is derived from whether there is light or no light. A code is then consulted which takes the length and sequence of this pattern of light and no light into account to produce a useful message.

A strip of paper with holes punched in it works on the same principle. If the paper was nothing but holes or had no holes in it at all it would be meaningless - it is the combination of holes and no holes that creates meaning. It is then left to a computer, whether human or machine, to decode the meaning and translate it into something useful.

It should come as no great shock that the weighty twin concepts of something and nothing are represented in our number system as the numerals 1 and 0 respectively. These two numerals in their varying patterns and sequences form a system of notation, and because it is comprised of two numbers, it is called the binary system. It is the binary system upon which the whole of digital computing technology operates.

In June 2008 I announced I was writing a book. The working title is 'Living in the Cloud'. It is a book intended to help people understand computers, the internet and other technology they use every day. I plan to have the book finished by the end of 2008, and will post excerpts as I write them for feedback and criticism. The following is one such excerpt:

About This Book

When I was 15, my favourite school subject was English. You might expect a book about how computers work to be written by someone with a gift for mathematics, but to me, the story of how computers have come to influence every aspect of our lives is less about mathematics than it is about communication.

No matter how intuitive our interactions with computers become, computers and humans still speak fundamentally different languages. As computer systems become more advanced, they adapt further to human conventions and culture, but so too must we learn to adapt to computer conventions and culture lest we wake up one day to find the world has moved on and we are no longer equipped to function in it. As always, adaptability is the key to survival.

When I was at school, the assignments I had carefully typed up and saved never seemed to work on the school computers. The lessons I looked forward to were delayed and cut short by countless painful hours watching teachers struggle with technology. In 1996, I was the only person in my class with access to the internet. I wasn't allowed to use it for my assignments. The school's IT person worked in his own little room, separated from the rest of the school not only by physical walls but psychological ones as well.

To me, computers had always been about discovery and possibility. I have my granddad to thank for this. He cannot resist fiddling with things, pulling them apart to see how they work and putting them together again in different ways. This did not always please my mother who as a little girl lost many cherished toys to granddad's hands-on curiosity, but to me it was fascinating, and as the only child of an only child I was the recipient of many interesting gadgets once granddad became bored with them. [click to continue...]

I'm writing a book. Well, more a series of essays that I will publish as a book. It's something I've always wanted to do, and indeed have attempted a few times. When I was younger I used to write short stories a lot, and the occasional fictional adventure of 20-30 pages. I look back at them now and cringe, not because they weren't any good - they were pretty good for age 15 - but because I haven't done anything like it since.

The last time I tried to write a book I was 18. It was called 'The Loneliest Number' - a psychological thriller about a group of people who flew to a tropical island under the impression that they had won a holiday prize but really were to be tortured and experimented on by a wealthy, deeply disturbed psychopath. Forced to betray and manipulate each other through a series of controlled experiments, they would be slowly exterminated one by one as their captor sought the most cunning among them so he could pit himself against them one-on-one in a final battle of wits, with a shocking finale.

I got a reasonable way into it and then perhaps in some sort of hundredth monkey moment, a show called Survivor came out and started the reality TV craze, which dampened my enthusiasm for the project considerably. Life had also taken some other turns and my interest in writing all but vanished for a long time. Much later another show called Lost started. I look back at my notes for The Loneliest Number now and am surprised how similar some of the central themes are to Lost. The producers of that project do a much better job than I ever could of course, and perhaps it is little wonder that Lost is my favourite show.

Perhaps if I get enough interest I will post what I wrote of The Loneliest Number. It was done in 1999-2000 and gives some interesting insight into where my mind was running at that time.

Since my company folded about a year ago I have found myself rediscovering many of my old favourite pursuits. This blog was born out of a desire to start writing again and I'm pleased to find I've been able to keep it up for these last six months to the point where it has now become a habitual part of my day. When I started the blog I didn't care if anybody read it or not, it was mostly for my own enjoyment. Nevertheless I've been surprised and touched to find that people do read it and find some value in it.

I'm taking the same approach with the book I am writing. It's a book I have wanted to read and recommend to people, but I haven't found it anywhere yet so I have decided to write it myself. It's about surviving in a world of computers and what it means to be technologically literate, written from the point of view of someone who sees the computer revolution as something as wild with possibility and excitement as the moon landing or the birth of a new republic; written for people who for one reason or another have been living under a stone and are in danger of sinking like one in this new age.

I have been thinking about it for a while now. It was even a project I was kicking around when the company was still up and running. Happily my ideas have been coming together more solidly of late and I'm now confident I can write the book I want to read. I'm announcing it here mostly as a way of committing myself to actually doing it.

You'll hear more about it as I work on it, I'll probably even post each chapter as I write it. Feedback and suggestions are welcome as always. I'd like to have it finished by the end of the year. I'm still thinking about how it will all fit together, but I'm using 'Living in the Cloud' as a working title. Let me know what you think!