Dare to think and change the world - Arthur C. Clarke tribute

Finding our way

As I left home this afternoon en-route my manager’s home where we had a meeting before going to the airport, the taxi driver was clueless about the address I gave him.

At first he looked in a map not to find the street but to check the spelling of the street since Dutch names with double vowels never come out the right way with foreigners like me.

One he got the correct spelling, he keyed the information into the in-built GPS system in his car and the journey began.

I then opined that the man who took the thinking to a useful conclusion about satellites only died a day before.

Germination of an idea

The idea of geosynchronous satellites was first discussed by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and then Herman Potočnik in 1928 wrote about them being used in communications with ground relays, he died a year after at the young age of 36, one only wonders if this “Einstein” died too soon.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke mooted in a paper “Extra-Terrestrial Relays – Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?” he wrote in 1945 that these satellites would be ideal for mass broadcasting or as telecommunications relays but did not believe it would happen in his lifetime – how wrong he was.

Dr. Harold Rosen took these science fiction ideas and with his team in 1959 began work to create reality that on the 26^th of July 1963, the first geosynchronous satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral into the earth’s geostationary orbit at 35,786 km (22,236 miles) directly above the equator.

Later in 1963 the very first satellite relayed telephone phone call in the world happened between US President John F. Kennedy and the Nigerian Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.

Global village of unrewarded minds

This was the beginning of the development of the global village that linked the world by telecommunications and also that of travel through the development of the turbo-jet engine by Sir Frank Whittle.

Unfortunately, these names are not as familiar as they should be, their ideas changed the world and what a debt of gratitude we owe the men even though they are not as celebrated as one would expect they should be.

The earth’s geostationary orbit is named for Arthur C. Clarke as the Clarke Orbit or Clarke Belt, he was no doubt deserving of a Nobel Prize not as a matter of his actualisation but for his instigative thinking and the consequences of the same.

I commend these men as the men who thought and did the improbable, the impossible and the unthinkable, they had the courage to publish their wild ideas and others took these wild ideas and made a new reality - the rest is history - we eventually found where my manager lived.

Adieu! Sir Arthur Clarke.

Note: GPS does not use geostationary orbits but these satellites as many other orbital belt variations derived from the original and pioneering ideas I talked about in the blog.

HTC Trinity - Connects, Works & Pleases

Mobile Phone does kitchen sink

Managing a new gadget is not that easy, only last month after failing to get Orange Netherlands to provide me with a smartphone in English for the past 18 months, I went out and got me one from one of those Internet outfits that do SIM-less mobile phones.

After reviewing everything I could find on the market, I decided on the HTC P3600 (codename HTC Trinity) smart phone in Bakelite black which gives you all kinds of connectivity including Wi-Fi and a flaky GPS functionality.

I had hardly switched it on and I was updating the ROM and many other things as I got accustomed to the keyboard and other interesting functions on the device.

Previously, I had used Bluetooth to transfer all the phone contacts on my SonyEricsson T610 phone to Microsoft Outlook; it was then a seamless transfer unto my new device.

Backup it up, do it now

When I consider how much data gets stored on mobile phones, it does not bear thinking of, the circumstance of losing all that data - in fact, I once had an Orange SPV 200 phone which allowed me to store all my phone data on an Orange server, unfortunately, out of a 2-year contract, I only got 6 months of service out of that phone.

It wasn't till about 3 weeks of usage that I found the Block Recogniser input method which uses the Graffiti script recognition that I mastered as a user of the HandSpring Visor Deluxe many years ago, but getting to write the G was a bit of trouble for quite a while.

By then, I had bought the Full Screen Keyboard from SPB Software House which seems to function for none of the applications I use; I am also shy of Pocket Word after typing in almost 2 pages of text only to find that some quirk in the device would not save my document. I now use the InkWriter/Note Taker application which I can open in Microsoft Office Word on my desktop and that is fine with me, lightweight functional and effective.

Mini-SD in playlist creation

Only yesterday, I had to acquire Storage Tools from SoftWinter because the 1GB mini-SD card suddenly disappeared half a gigabyte of music files and there was nothing I could do to retrieve my files; imagine, I lived with that for almost 2 weeks, it had become a seething nuisance I could no more entertain; after copying the data I could find to disk, I ran the Storage Tools analyser which started creating 16KB CHK files; well that was trouble I was not willing to entertain any further either.

A quick reboot saw me reformatting the mini-SD card and then putting back the data I had backed up elsewhere, just a quarter of my Classical Music library and we were ready to go.

I launched the Window Media Player 10 Mobile for Pocket PC application and could not find a way to create a Playlist, in fact, many forums had indicated you had to create an ASX file and then upload that to the device.

That was not going to work for me, I had randomly selected the files I wanted on my device, I needed to be able to create the Playlist on the device itself, before long I was installing the Playlist Manager freeware to handle my music files in situ - I created the Playlist but could not get the device to use it.

Whilst the device was playing back some music, I clicked on the Now Playing option, then on the Menu and found the option Save Playlist..., clicking on that, I was able to give the playlist a name and it automatically loaded all my files into the new Playlist and there I had it. One can create Playlists on a Windows Mobile 5.0 device, if you know how to do it.

Live Searching the wrong country

So, this morning as I ended up in the Microsoft home page in the USA, there was a picture of a fresh faced developer you might not be too familiar with along with an advertisement for Live Search for your Windows Mobile device, a facility that gives you information about services, directions, traffic and businesses and in your area; but when I checked, it only had information for the USA and the UK, nothing for the Netherlands.

It would appear Microsoft has a competitor to Google Earth called Microsoft Virtual Earth all on my mobile device, it would appear, for now and for the near future, I have a mobile phone that works, no need for an iPhone just as I have had no need for an iPod.

Meanwhile, as I explored the world at my stylus-tip, I scrolled down to Africa, I homed in on a location that brought back memories of childhood - to be continued in another blog.