Day: August 2, 2008

WIJFR: Snow Crash

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It is a world where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and the Internet–incarnate as the Metaverse–looks something like last year’s hype would lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist–hacker, samurai swordsman, and pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer drug called Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what’s a guy with a name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue.

“Snow Crash” was the first novel I ever read by Neal Stephenson and since earlier this year I finished reading the entire “Baroque Cycle” and then re-read “Cryptonomicon” I decided to re-read “Snow Crash” as well.

When Hiro’s hacker friend Da5id ends up a vegetable after being exposed to a new “drug” called Snow Crash in the Metaverse, he finds himself caught up in plot that involves Sumerian tablets, ancient languages, religious cults, and viruses (both biological and technological). He’ll end up working with the Mafia, the U.S. government, a 15-year old skateboard courier, and his hacker friends against a media mogul, his religious followers, and a crazy brute with poor impulse control and a nuclear warhead in the sidecar of his motorcycle. It’s a fun and fast read.

I read a lot of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling when I was younger, so I was no stranger to cyberpunk, but something was different about “Snow Crash.” Gibson gave us cyberspace, but Stephenson gives us the Metaverse. I also don’t think I ever came across the phrase “neuro-linguistic hacker” in any of Sterling’s work.

Funny side note: while I reading the book, I came across my purchase receipt, nested in between some pages.

snowcrash-receipt-736069If memory serves, I purchased this book while I was in Pleasanton, CA (hence the 510 area code) at a PeopleSoft training class (I found an old Delta boarding pass with the receipt as well). So it’s been about 12 years since I first encountered Neal Stephenson. His next book, “Anathem” is due to be released this fall.

TiVo releases 9.4 software update

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My Series3 box upgraded to the new 9.4 software release yesterday. The Summer 2008 Service Update is for Series3 and TiVo HD DVRs only and includes the following new features:

  • the ability to play (or delete) an entire folder at once (which is helpful if you want to queue up a bunch of SpongeBob for the kids)
  • the on-screen Guide is now available even when you’re watching a recording (before, if you pressed Guide while watching a recording it would dump you out to Live TV)
  • you can jump forward and back 24 hours in the Guide by using the Instant Replay and Skip-to-Tick buttons on the remote
  • there’s now a “search by callsign” option in the Guide as well (if, for some reason, you can remember your FOX affiliate’s callsign, but not the channel number, I guess)
  • one-click closed captioning toggle from the channel banner (my personal favorite new feature!)
  • your Thumbs Ratings can now be refined via a separate screen under TiVo Suggestions

This update also added a new application to stream YouTube videos to television through the TiVo. It’s been known for a while that the decoder in the S3 and THD boxes supported H.264, but this is the first time (to my knowledge) that functionality has been used. Work is already underway in the community to reverse engineer this so that H.264 video can be sent directly back to the TiVo without the need to transcode it into MPEG-2 first.

The discussion thread about 9.4 on TCF is here, and the pyTivo folks are talking about the H.264 stuff here.