I read in a Linux magazine that Adobe were releasing Flex Builder for Linux. I thought this was really exciting as it was a great chance to use my new Linux box for some development and write a basic Flash application. It regularly annoyed me that I had never developed a Flash application.

Adobe Flex Builder Linux Public Alpha is currently up to alpha 4. It is a plug-in for Eclipse, a very popular, extendable development IDE build on Java. I had to install Eclipse 3.3.2 because earlier version weren't working on my machine and later version have problems with the plug in. I wanted to use OpenJava but I couldn't get Eclipse working on it, so I decided it would just be easier to use Sun Java.

Once I got Eclipse and Flex Builder working it was pretty fun. I was surprised how much of the stuff I learned for Silverlight could be applied to Flex Builder. In fact quite a few things I thought were unique to Silverlight were already features in Flex Builder.

I found ActionScript was quite easy to get into, it looks similar to JavaScript but with extra type information. The intellisense for ActionScript with Eclipse and Flex Builder is really good and really helped.

Anyway here is my first Flash application!

It was great from me to solve the mystery behind Flash files and find it is just source code. In this application there are some ActionScript classes, the main MXML and HTML/JavaScript to host it. Get the source code here.

Well that was pretty fun but there is so much more. I'd like to write an application that interacts with a server and try some of the cool data binding Flex Builder supports.

Just recently finished reading Ray Kurzweil’s book, “The Singularity is Near”.

I found it to be an intriguing read which did a really good job of exploring the potential future of humanity and beyond. Being a big fan of Ian Banks science fiction ‘Culture’ based novels, Kurzweil’s book really entertained some of my geekiest fantasies about super intelligent AI machines (Minds), genetic enhancements, replaceable organs/limbs, neurological implants, brain machine interfacing, drug glands, nanotechnology, personality backups, space travel... and the like.

So what is this Singularity?

Prior to reading the book I thought of the Singularity as some sort of AI entity (like the self-aware Skynet), but Kurzweil describes it as …

‘… a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, it’s impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly changed.’

There’s no questioning the rapid advancement of technology we’ve seen in just the past ten years or so. The continual improvements we’re experiencing in the collaboration and communication of global knowledge is astounding – Google, Skype, Wikipedia, Facebook, SecondLife, … but where is all this leading us?

Kurzweil extrapolates the exponential trends of accelerating returns in everything from Moore’s law and computation processing power, to RAM/transistor pricing, to internet usage and bandwidth speed increases. He then uses these estimates to predict some of the key technological events that will lead to the singularity. Such as, …

• achieving the computational power of the human brain ~10^16 cps by 2025 (today we are at around 10^9 cps)
• achieving the subtle software algorithms of the brain and its massively parallel pattern recognition abilities.
• reversed engineered the brain by late 2020’s
• the next waves of GNR technology (Genetic, Nanotechnology, Robotics)
• the human body version 2.0 – all organs replaceable or redundant, non-biological brain implants/enhancements, nanotechnology based health monitoring systems
• virtual worlds indistinguishable from reality – think the Matrix.
• being able to backup a copy of the human brain
• achieving a type II civilization status by the end of this century.

He presents some great ideas and seemingly plausible arguments all backed up by several pages of notes and references (around 150 pages!!).

When is this Singularity happening?

Kurzweil predicts that by 2045 the technological singularity will have occurred.  Life as we know it now will be forever changed - which is a tough pill to swallow, and quite difficult to imagine.

This estimated date is somewhat supported by Intel's CTO, Justin Rattner, keynote speech at the Intel Developer Forum where he says the Gap between Humans, Machines will Close by 2050

Beyond the singularity, well, who knows … apparently by 2080 we should have enough computation power to be able to compute the equivalent of all human thought over the last ten thousand years … in ten microseconds!!

What will the Singularity achieve? ...

“the goal of the singularity will be to eventually engineer the universe it wants by saturating matter and energy in it’s vicinity with intelligence“

What does this mean for us humans?

One of the chapters in the book deals with the impact of these technological advances on humanity and some of the hurdles we'll have to overcome. He raises and explores some core philosophical questions like ...

• What is it to be human?
• Can a machine ever reach consciousness? – and how could we prove it?
• Can we be truly duplicated? Is the copy really me?

It becomes apparent that Kurzweil himself intends to do what he can to extend his lifetime until the time of the singularity … and then be copied and uploaded into a machine so that he can fulfil himself as a woman - KAPOW!! - yea, ok some of this stuff is a bit weird, but that aside I enjoyed his further explorations of human duplication.

For instance, if you could be duplicated exactly – every thought, memory, and behaviour and put into another body which looked exactly the same – maybe a few enhancements ;-) – or maybe you at a younger age would it still be you? Can you imagine the scientist walking in to tell you that the procedure was 100% successful and version 2.0 of you is ready to go, but now it’s time to put version 1.0 of you out of commission. This predicament reminds of Hugh Jackman’s character in the movie “The Prestige” and his line “Would I be the man in the box or the prestige?”

Ok, that’s doesn’t sound too good, but what if you were replaced piece by piece until version 2.0 was achieved – this sounds like the ultimate refactor! So Kurzweil’s point is though, at what point would we stop being version 1.0? What piece of us makes us, us? – or, where is our soul/consciousness kept? Makes you think, hey?

How things could go wrong...

Besides all the positives that could come out of the Singularity Kurzweil spends some time delving into some of the negatives, or what disasters may prevent the Singularity, such as ...

• nanotechnology going wrong and the gray goo wiping us out globally in 90 minutes (The Blob)
• releasing new breeds of deadly viruses accidentally (12 Monkeys, 28 Days Later)
• asteroids smacking into earth causing an extinction event (I sure my lowflyingrocks twitter feed will let me know a fews hours after this has happened;-) (Armageddon)
• Information/blueprints for things we shouldn’t know about becoming widely available to the public (like skyscrapers, weapons, blackhole generators, etc.) and then falling into the wrong hands.
• superior AI deciding the humans are no longer important. (Matrix)

Obviously a lot of Kurweil's predictions also attract heavy criticism.

Read it

It’s a great, well written, easy to read book that stimulates the imagination as to where progress is taking us in the extreme. At the very least you could treat it as an entertaining science fiction novel with loads of great quotes. Every scientist/engineer/geek should read it.

Apparently he’s making a documentary style movie to explain the Singularity which will be out sometime next year.  This should thrust some of his ideas into the mainstream, so I'm expecting all the technophobes out there to work themselves into a frenzy of mass hysteria ... should be fun.

If I've been able to whet your appetite check out these blogs,feeds,videos for more singularity goodness ...

• Ray Kurzweil's site
• http://onsingularity.com/
• http://singularityhub.com/
• http://www.singinst.org/overview/whyworktowardthesingularity/
• About Type 1,2,3,4 civilisations (video)
• What Intel thinks about it - Press release, Developer Forum videos
• Anti-singularity ideas- http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6273

The existing system

We have a moderate to low spec'd computer in our lounge room running Windows XP. We built it about a year ago with spare parts lying round the house. We use the box for:

• Sharing files for everyone on our network
• Playing media through the TV and stereo system
• Hosting Subversion

The box usually doesn't have a monitor, keyboard or mouse attached. As it has no input devices we use VNC server. This works out ok as we have several other desktops and laptops around the house we use to connect to it and control it.

Why change

The box was working fine so there was no real reason to change to Linux except that I really wanted some exposure to it. Eventually I want to try out setting up a LAMP web server and maybe try Struts and JSP.

I knew I needed to get the box doing everything it was doing before or else my house mates would be pushing to revert back to the XP system. I haven't used Linux much, but I figured if I spend some time with it I could probably get it doing all the things the existing box is doing. I wrote a list of the things I need the Linux box to do:

• Use the TV as a primary display
• Share files with our Microsoft boxes
• Boot to an IDE without user input
• Host Subversion
• Allow remote access
• Play media (DVD, CD's, MP3, DivX etc)

Nothing to difficult sounding there you would hope..

Choose a distro

I went into this with fairly limited knowledge of Linux. I'd installed Mandrake years ago as a dual boot on my personal PC but never really spent any time actually using it. I'd also used openSUSE while I was in Ireland getting training with OpenJaws travel software. Recently Brodie tried the Ubuntu live CD at work, but we didn't really get passed the gimmicky UI features. 

After doing a bit of reading I still had no idea which one I wanted to use.

Trials and tribulations

I started with Mandriva for no real reason. On the first install it didn't detect my graphics card correctly and crashed horribly every time I went anywhere near the GUI graphic settings. I wasn't ready to start screwing with my xorg.conf yet, so I tried installing it again. I didn't have any luck this time either, I couldn't even finish the install because after I tried testing a graphic mode it returned me to a mode I couldn't read the text. (That mode reminded me of writing little real mode VGA graphics demos in assembly, it was easy to leave the console unreadable if you messed with the graphics mode using the BIOS interrupts and didn't return it to the correct mode, 0x80 I think I remember). I decided to try another distro in hope the install might do a better job detecting my graphics card.

openSUSE was much quicker to install but comes with very few extras. openSUSE did choose the correct open source drivers from my graphics card and installed perfectly. There were tools to configure a dual head display but after a couple of hours reading endless forums, manually editing my xorg.conf file, restarting the X system and unsuccessfully attempting to install the ATI binary drivers, I gave up. It wasn't a success yet but I did learn heaps more about Linux and was confident I could get the TV working if I persisted.

Finally I tried Ubuntu after I read that installing the ATI drivers was easy. Installing the ATI drivers was simple but it didn't immediately solve my problem. I still wasn't getting anything on the TV. After another couple of hours many more "atp-gets" I finally got the TV to clone the primary display.

Success!

Everything else was pretty easy;

• I installed the proprietary stuff needed to play proprietary media formats
• I used "apt-get" to get most of the additional software I needed which made things pretty easy
• I could share a folder using the GUI
• I could read my external NTFS drive, but I did have to force mount it.
• There was an option in the administration to automatically login a user on startup  
• Remote access to VNC clients was build-in and I just needed to enable it
• Subversion was easy to configure as it used the same command line functionality as the Windows version.
• It was quite easy to get the Subversion server automatically starting and I learnt how run scripts on startup

Can't turn water into wine

Everything went so well I was inspired to try using a crappy DVB TV tuner card I bought, hated and never used to watch television. Even with a fast computer and perfect reception it would still start losing frames when the video was panning. What frustrated me even more was I could only use the software that came with it to use it, when I started using Vista I couldn't use it at all.

In about 20 minutes I able to add it, tune it and get some video out it. The only problem was it looked even worse than when it was using its own software on XP. I know there is plenty more I could do to get it working better, I was happy I got it working at all and probably won't use it again.

The response

After two weekends I've finally got the box back where it belongs, doing everything it was before except now running ubuntu. I can still boot into the old XP system if I boot off the secondary hard disk, but I'm happy leaving ubuntu as the default boot and not even adding XP as an option in the boot loader. My house mates are happy too, apparently the VNC is much better that it was with windows but they want a music player that supports play lists.  

That's it

I'll report back on how the Linux box handles over time and what I do with it. I've also created a VMWare Linux instance on my personal computer which I'll hopefully use to try out running web servers and maybe get into a little bit of programming.   

Its been frustrating at times but over all its been lots of fun getting this Linux box up and running, I've learned lots about Linux and I want to learn more.