Mint.com . . . sigh

Mint.com is so great. With caveats.

The good: a truly unified view, including Paypal accounts, HELOC, savings accounts, Roths, 401ks. The whole enchilada. I've tried to wrangle Quicken, etc. in the past to get the whole enchilada, and I've found it damn hard. Mint gives you the whole picture with zero effort. This is so valuable I would pay for it, but Mint is free.

The bad: Everything else Mint does, especially the analysis and budgeting tools. They are shallow and silly. Example: Mint can show you your "net income" month by month. But it's not accurate. Why not? I poked around, and it turns out that their net income graph apparently only counts income as stuff literally tagged "Income" in their tagging system, and does NOT include things tagged, say, "paycheck". (The funny thing is, paycheck is one of their own subcategories . . . inside of the "Income" category.)

I have to assume that stuff will improve in the future. Then Mint will be truly amazing and without caveats.

Boring Technicalities of Code Signing

For posterity, here is an embed of some discoveries about code signing certificates.  What I've been trying to do lately is to sign and distribute an Office plugin, using the ClickOnce installer system for VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office).

Short story: don't use Thawte certificates until they start including something called an AIA in their code signatures.

Long story: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsto/thread/44841131-58e7-4b8a-add2-a9cff869b82e/

Error:  "Customized functionality in this application will not work because the certificate used to sign the deployment manifest for MyPlugin.vsto is not trusted."

Solution: Use VeriSign.  (Or someone else -- I now just need to figure out which other vendors are doing it right.)

Chrome, one year along

From what I've seen, it looks like Google's done a pretty lackluster job of promoting the Chrome browser amongst the general public. But of those precious few end-users who DO know what the heck Chrome is, many of them don't seem to care much.   Here's why I think it's worth caring about, from strictly user (as opposed to a geek -- or a market) perspective:

• If you run Windows, you probably find it slow.  (Windows 7 may help with this . . . at least initially.  Then we'll see.)  But Chrome is a free piece of software that will probably make some of your most frequent actions faster, all day. Window opening; web app performance; eating little RAM; and other factors should contribute to making the same amount of work faster, on the same machine.
• Opening a browser window -- how often do you do this at work? My frequency is going up and up. 5 times an hour? 10 times an hour? 20 sometimes? Might be 500 times a week. In IE, it takes many seconds to get a web page window loaded and ready to type in, even if you set your home page to blank (as I always, always do). And Firefox, sadly, has been getting heavy.  (Or perhaps it was like this all along, and Chrome is making me notice it.)  Opening a Chrome window just takes NO TIME -- it's more like a piece of the OS, like a file explorer window, but faster. It comes up NOW. And it goes away NOW. Once you get used to it, waiting for FireFox or IE to boot seems like a bother. You use the web more, because using the web suddenly gets cheaper. 
• I know an IT professional who, every time he wanted to use one of these newfangled "search engine" things, would open an IE window, then (with one finger) type "G-O-O-G-L-E-.-C-O-M" and press return. Then he would find the mouse pointer. Then he would use it to click inside the provided search box and begin typing a query.  Total time: 15 seconds?  (a few hundred times a week?  He did it this way for years, and still might.)  There's no need for this. There's no need, actually, to ever see the Google homepage itself at all, and it shocks me that folks still do.  Do not have a homepage!  Open a browser window (perhaps with a keyboard shortcut or by using Spotlight (command+space, then type the first few letters of the name of your browser) and just start typing what you want.  And you will get it.  Chrome is built around doing just this.  (And the other browsers will let you -- Firefox quite well.) 
• Web app performance . . . isn't just an overclocker fetish. Serious javascript-heavy apps are starting to appear in lots of places, not just in the GOOG domain (Wave is a BIG app), but in Apple's online apps (Sproutcore framework), Zoho, and many others. And these apps work better and come up faster in a good browser. Even embedded web apps (Flash/Flex/Silverlight/etc) may use javascript bridges. Blogs and forums are getting more and more javascripty. And with a fast Javascript engine, more features of (increasingly) more web pages just start to feel, subjectively, faster and more useful. You use it more, because it's cheaper (in terms of your time and attention). 
• For some objective measures: on a lame corporate laptop, I ran the Sunspider browser benchmark with a score under 1000ms in Chrome; around 3500ms in Firefox, and around 35000ms in IE7. (I get about 5000ms in IE8 on my VMWare Virtual Win XP box running on a Mac.) And in the beta channel version of Chrome, they just made Javascript about 20% faster again. 
• Windows and tabs are cheaper in Chrome, memory-wise, than in other browsers.
• And they free ALL their memory when they close. This is really important for end-users, though it's a geeky detail. Browser memory-creep is more and more of a problem since a given browser may be running, in one form or another, for many many hours, or even many days.  This is a result of the fact that we're using the web more.
• UI stuff is important to me, but I won't say too much about that here except:
• UI-wise, tabs will help us manage many windows as we begin to use the web for more and more things.  Chrome has a better way to do them, UI-wise. 
• The omnibar is one place for google searching, URL typing, and history searching.  I suspect that more and more end-users will start to rely this, once they realize it's there and what it's actually doing for them.
• Constant updates. Chrome's use of the clever google updater means almost continuous -- but INVISIBLE -- updates. The updates are very small because of Google's new binary-diff technology, and they are pushed out very frequently. This translates into safety and stability.  The browser just takes care of itself, which is a nice feeling for such an important application.
• Extensions: are coming. But it's funny; it turns out I can live without most of my Firefox extensions. One thing I like is to have bookmarks sync-ed among my browsers on any machine I use. But this is built into Chrome (though I'm not sure if this feature has been rolled out to all users yet).

A note about Safari: Safari on Windows is also really fast. But I just don't like it as much. The omnibar is not as good; the tab system is more old-fashioned; and it seems more quirky/non-compatible/crashy on Windows than on the Mac. It doesn't have Chrome's excellent memory management and memory partitioning between all tabs. But it's still a better option than IE for daily use.

Update: Play Nintendo in the browser.  Chrome: a very playable 45fps.  Safari: unplayable at 11fps . Firefox unplayable at about 8 fps.

ēno interactive whiteboard

No relation to Brian Eno.

The people in our Houston office decided to buy three of these "interactive whiteboards":

http://www.polyvision.com/ProductSolutions/enointeractivewhiteboard/tabid/157/Default.aspx

It's mostly just a whiteboard; also a magnet board, which seems nice; and also, it's anoto-dotted, which means that each point of the surface has tiny markings which a special pen (with a tiny camera in the tip) can see, so the pen can know "where" on the board it's writing at the time.

So you hang this board up, and then shine a projector on it whenever you feel like doing something digital.  You use their bluetooth pen at those times.

There are some significant hurdles for something like this to succeed.

They speak highly of their durable surface (lifetime guarantee, etc. etc.), but I wonder how it REALLY holds up.  No, but REALLY.  If the the bluetooth pen stops being able to see the tiny dots properly, the game stops.  How many times can you accidentally write on this surface with a permanent Sharpie and get it clean again?  Those dots really are tiny.

Another question: how does the projector get calibrated so it can register physical space (inches on the board) against pixel space?  Does the machine driving the projector need some software?  Does said software work on Mac? On *nix?  Does it have a cumbersome installer?

I guess all these questions roll up into one fundamental usability (and sociality) question: will people ever turn on the projector, after some initial honeymoon period?  Or does the ēno just default to being an expensive whiteboard?

AT&T: short rant

I was just reading in the NY Times about the stresses on AT&T's network from the iPhone.  But that really does nothing to explain why I started seeing 1 bar (or less) ALL THE TIME, in a lot of places in the city where I used to have fine service -- such as my own kitchen.  This is not a load problem!  My wife's non-iPhone has been falling into the same holes in coverage as my iPhone.

If AT&T would give some straight information about exactly what's going on -- where are the towers; what are the upgrades; who is affected? what is the timeframe? -- I would feel like they had things under control.  But it's  all shrouded in mystery.  Or mysterious incompetence.  Hard to tell.  

Dear large corporations: the way that people talk endlessly on the intertubes about openness?  Those folks might be idiots -- but even if they are, they STILL might be on to something.  Let that sink in for a second.

Precipitate

Here's a handy thing I use about 3 times a day and thought I should not hide under a bushel.  

Precipitate.

Puts all your Google Docs (and Google Bookmarks, if you have those) in your Spotlight index.  I use Spotlight for everything from app launching to doing simple math (try it) to looking up words in the dictionary, thesaurus, or wikipedia (try it).  Now I also use it for searching and launching my cloud docs as well.

Precipitate is open source.  And if I get a bee in my bonnet, I'm going to dig into it and extend the bookmarks feature.  Instead of indexing just the names/titles of my Google Bookmarks, I want it to index the CONTENTS of those pages.  So then, whatever I bookmark would  go into the Spotlight hopper with everything else.

Updating Java: Boring Topic, Exciting Results

Eclipse, NetBeans, GWT, and other Java-dependent software just got better and way faster on my Mac OS X machine. I had to pay a visit to "Java Preferences" -- which is an application! -- and drag Java SE 6 (64 bit) into FIRST place in the list of Java runtimes. Previously, I guess I was always hitting Java 1.5 (or Java 5, as the case may be -- what kind of naming scheme is this, anyway??)

Can verify the changes succeeded by running "java -version" from the command line, before and after.

I had to do this in order to get my first Google Wave Robot working. And now it works!

Nagging video codec headache: SOLVED

Simple problem: have .wmv file. Want to convert it to a .mov so I can edit it with iMovie. I have access to Windows or Mac, but don't want to pay for any software.

Don't have QuickTime Pro (and can't quite confirm that it can actually do this job).

ffmpegx fails to convert -- complains about an incorrect framerate. I have used ffmpegx in the past to create (for example) .flv flash movies, which has been great . . . but it frequently chokes on .wmv files.

Windows Media Encoder will only generate .wmv, of course.

I found two solutions, both free:

http://media-convert.com/convert/ is a web site that takes a video upload and gives you back a converted video, in whatever format you like. The site looks somewhat sketchy, but the results were fine enough.

But the big winner for me is MPEG Streamclip, an obscure, friendly, free Mac OS X app. It's quick and simple and does the job. Finally.

Update: there's a wide variety of compression schemes, within the Quicktime exporter. The default -- Apple Motion JPEG A -- doesn't compress too well. H.264 compressed 30x more for the same quality level.

Connecting to a server with Mac OS X Leopard

I connect to servers a lot at work, in a Windows environment (using smb://, mostly). The Finder has an awkward interface for doing this. By contrast, a pretty good way to do it quickly is through QuickSilver. The trigger you want might be in ~/Library/Recent Servers, and it might come up easily -- but it also might not. In Spotlight, it definitely doesn't come up (at least, not for me).

So a good alternative is to manually create a trigger for Quicksilver and Spotlight to find. In a location familiar to both indexers, make a text file (a script) containing something like:

open smb://machine/folder

Make the file executable (e.g., from the Terminal: chmod +x your_script_file.command).

This works well. The command file can also be double-clicked in the Finder, which makes it an easy solution to share with others.

However, when it runs, this script has the unfortunate side effect of opening Terminal, opening a new Terminal window, and then leaving the window hanging around after it's finished. Have googled for solutions to this, and not found any.

So an even better way to fashion a trigger is to use Script Editor to make an Applescript that says something like this:

do shell script "open smb://machine/folder"

Give the script a descriptive name like machine_folder_connect.app, so it's easy to find through the first few letters of the machine name (Spotlight or Quicksilver), or the initial letter of the machine name + the initial letter of the folder or share of interest (Quicksilver). When saving the script, turn OFF the "Run Only" option. Otherwise it can't be edited later on.

Clay Shirky interview

This whole thing is outstanding.

http://www.cjr.org/overload/interview_with_clay_shirky_par.php?page=all

One highlight for me:

RJ: Why do so many people seem focused on this idea that the Web has cut our attention spans down? What's responsible for that phenomenon?

CS: You know, "Life was better when I was younger" is always an acceptable narrative. Right? And so for anybody who was brought up genuflecting to the literary culture and the virtues of reading Tolstoy--and essentially Tolstoy is a trope in these things, War and Peace is the longest novel in the sort of Euro-centric canon--you could always make the argument that the present is worse than the past by simply pointing to the virtues of the past. And so, what the Web does is that it does what all amateur increases do, which is it decreases the average quality of what's available. It is exactly, precisely, the complaint made about the printing press. So, the only thing surprising about the Web, in a way, is that it's been a long time since we've had a medium that increased the amount of production of written material this dramatically.

But people made the same complaint about comic books, they made the same complaint about paperbacks, and they made the same complaint about the vulgarity of the printing press. Whenever you let more people in, things get vulgar by definition. And people who benefited under the old system or who dislike or distrust vulgarity as a process always have room to complain. But, the interesting thing is, when you say so many people believe this, in fact almost no one believes this, right? There's a tiny, tiny slice of the chattering classes for whom "Life was better when I was younger" is an acceptable complaint to make, and they have these little conferences or whatever and agree with one another about that phenomenon. But when you look at the actual use of the Web, it is through the roof. And it has continued in an unbroken growth from the early '90s until now. So, in fact, almost everybody thinks it's a good idea because they're embracing it and they're experimenting with it and they don't really care what we think.

And when I say "we," I mean--I am a member of the Chardonnay-swilling East Coast liberal media elite. But I also recognize that anything I might have to say about the utility of the media actually isn't going to influence whether or not people are going to adopt this. And so once you get out of the idea that basically the previous avatars of the cultural good, and the world that George W.S. Trow chronicled so beautifully in "Within the Context of No Context"--once you grasp that those people are powerless to that effect, powerless with regard to the adoption curve--the question really becomes, "How do you point out an effect where something has been damaged?" And that's where I think a lot of this conversation about reading breaks down, because if you assume that reading Tolstoy is an a priori good, your world crumbled in 1970. And it's hard to point to the Web as responsible for any of that because that was a done deal for some time.

If you want to point to more proximate harms, it would be very hard to argue, for example, that innovation, inventiveness, new intellectual discoveries had slowed as a result of the Internet, and so people are left with these kind of mealy-mouth cultural critiques, because nostalgia becomes the only bulwark against change. The actual effects of making more information available to more people have been enormously beneficial to society, yet not to the intellectual gatekeepers in the generation in which that change happened.

RJ: What's your response to people who say that all this information that's out there, all this knowledge that we're producing is great, and there's all this access that we didn't have before. But we also risk information overload alongside, and we don't--

CS: Information overload started in Alexandria, in the library of Alexandria, right? That was the first example where we have concrete archaeological evidence that there was more information in one place than one human being could deal with in one lifetime, which is almost the definition of information overload. And the first deep attempt to categorize knowledge so that you could subset; the first take on the information filtering problem appears in the library of Alexandria.

By the time that the publishing industries spun up in Venice in the early- to mid-1500s, the ability to have access to more reading material than you could finish in a lifetime is now starting to become a general problem of the educated classes. And by the 1800s, it's a general problem of the middle class. So there is no such thing as information overload, there's only filter failure, right? Which is to say the normal case of modern life is information overload for all educated members of society.

If you took the contents of an average Barnes and Noble, and you dumped it into the streets and said to someone, "You know what's in there? There's some works of Auden in there, there's some Plato in there. Wade on in and you'll find what you like." And if you wade on in, you know what you'd get? You'd get Chicken Soup for the Soul. Or, you'd get Love's Tender Fear. You'd get all this junk. The reason we think that there's not an information overload problem in a Barnes and Noble or a library is that we're actually used to the cataloging system. On the Web, we're just not used to the filters yet, and so it seems like "Oh, there's so much more information." But, in fact, from the 1500s on, that's been the normal case.

The Black Belt: How Soil Types Determined the 2008 Election in the Deep South

http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fvigorousnorth.blogspot.com%2F2008%2F11%2Fblack-belt-how-soil-types-determined.html

brandon (from phone)

A few use cases for Twitter

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080903-twitter-far-more-than-what-i-had-for-lunch-today.html

- Scottsdale police department is publishing (minor) community news: potholes, burglars
- Comcast is looking for angry customers
- Serialized fiction (my professional opinion: total dud)
- Amazon has created what’s basically an AIM bot, using the twitter reply mechanism
- Corporate blogs, except smaller (I’m not big on this, either)

AIM bots via twitter, twitter in an AIM bot . . . . what looks like a patchwork is shaping up nicely, I think, into a very generalized idea of “publishing”, publishing with absolute flexibility as to audience and grain size.

All kinds of entities can publish messages (the Chicago Tribune; my grandma; my car; my toaster; my artificial left knee...), at different granularities, of different classes and priorities. What we are slowly building is a general means for orchestrating
- what messages I emit, to whom. The governing issue here is privacy and appropriateness.
- what messages I care to consume, and how. The governing issue here is convenience.

The first pre-requisite for building this general messaging system is a “network” -- social, I suppose, but so’s everything -- where I can enumerate what my relationship is to different entities. What is my level of trust and interest in: the Chicago Tribune; my grandma; my toaster; my left knee; my car; my car’s mechanic.

Once I have that all set up (which may take a few years yet), the rest is mostly plumbing: publishing and subscribing, and re-publishing. When I “subscribe” to my car, I’ll choose to get messages of some priority level (e.g. “low tire pressure”) along some appropriate and convenient channel {SMS | IM | email | whatever }. I’ll also re-publish some of that information, for instance to my spouse and my mechanic. The mechanic subscribes to me, his customer, through whatever channel is convenient for him — a work order system; email; a “podcast”(ish) where his incoming messages are batched “read” to him while he fixes cars; whatever. I may not know. The medium is not the message. The message will make its way through whatever medium makes the most sense.

In a corporate setting, I think we can safely stop asking “Is there any enterprise use for Twitter?”, because the question might as well be, “Is there any enterprise use for sending and receiving messages?”. The only question is, for a given class of messages, what is the most convenient and appropriate mechanism we can think of? If we discover what looks like a “new” medium at this point, the chances are we’ve simply discovered a nicer way of clustering and channeling a certain class of messages that already existed.

from a book called "art & fear"

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Robert Reich: Responsible Capitalism and Democracy

The little man makes long, detailed, crushing analysis of the idea of "corporate social responsibility". For him, it's basically a wishful substitute for -- and often a way of interfering with the making of -- a good law.

The only thing I disagree with here is his occasional use of his pet term "supercapitalism" (since some of this comes from his book of the same name). I think the word "capitalism" is actually pretty sufficient.

 

 

Responsible Capitalism and Democracy

A recent post-bike-home smoothie, with nutrition info

I'm normally hugely into the frozen fruit smoothie, but this is really, really good for a different purpose.

   Calories  Protein   Fat    Carbs   Fiber    Sodium
      305.0    12.8    12.9    37.5    7.1      236.2
% of Calories:   16%     37%    47%

Unsweetened Soymilk
1 cup  80.0     7.0     4.0      4.0    1.0      85.0
Peanut Butter, Natural, Creamy
1 tbsp 100.0    3.5     8.0      3.5    1.0      55.0
Cocoa powder (unsweetened)
1 tbsp 20.0     1.0     0.5      3.0    2.0      95.0
Banana - medium (preferably frozen)
      105.0    1.3      0.4     27.0     3.1    1.2

Time surplus

A fun point to ponder from the author Clay Shirky.

-----------
http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.

Green stuff

This was something i posted on an internal work blog, but I thought I'd share it with you folks as well. 

About companies going Green -- response to Baiju.

Economists love to talk about externalities, right? -- aka, letting some other entity pick up the tab for something. The other entity might be "the public" or "the government" or "the river" or "the atmosphere". If I light a campfire, the atmosphere takes away the toxic fumes for me, for free. And it hopefully processes them into safe breathable air as well, at some point. Excellent.

It's clearly economically rational to take advantage of externalities. It's better to pass costs than hold the bag. And sometimes absolutely no one is holding the bag. (Disposal of the Voyager spacecraft? The galaxy can handle it.)

But here's where it gets tricky: when one day you find the person holding the bag -- if there is such a person -- and you see them paying an unfair cost, it becomes a moral situation in the minds of many people. When acid rain is destroying forests and hurting peoples' health, people will want to step in to change the equation. And we do, and we did. (Slowly.) And then the moral balance is maybe restored. (There's even a good word for that: "justice".) Resume normal economics at this point.

We're at a funny time in history. New externalities are being identified. Some cost-passers (say, American corn farmers with their chemical fertilizers) are being suddenly matched with bag-holders. (Gulf coast shrimp farmers dealing with a dead zone the size of New Jersey where nothing can live -- look it up). But we are still in a limbo, waiting to see how this, and lots of other, formerly benign/unnoticed externality situations can be accounted for in the economic, legal, and regulatory infrastructure. This infrastructure will eventually let us turn what we deem to be unfair externality situations into more above-board kinds of economic transactions. (Tax the fertilizers--ban them--regulate their use--filter the river--compensate the shrimpers--whatever.)

In this limbo, companies don't yet NEED to start putting all their externalities on the books. It's not always clear that they can right now. When required to pay, they will surely pay. If all airlines raise ticket prices because of a new carbon tax that will help pay explicitly for the formerly free CO2 externality, Accenture will pay those prices.

But in the interim, without the new frameworks that will help us move from externalities toward a set of new "internalities", the public sees moral situations where it didn't see them before and it wants action. People have new information about a moral situation -- they want to exercise some ethical behavior. They want to restore "justice". The sense of fairness is something about people (and even many apes) that is so basic you can measure it in the lab. And it's a good thing!

So yeah, some companies are competing for attention in the public marketplace by trying to demonstrate that they will help individuals exercise their moral choice in the matter. Thus: "GREEN". Is this "PR" and "marketing"? To the extent that it's about relaying a message to the public, then it's public relations, sure. But public relations can be informative sometimes, and this might be one of those cases. Having this information might actually help some people make the choice they actually want to make, so there's a real value to that. To the extent that all of this Green stuff is not actually resolving the underlying externality situations, it's sort of a game, but it might be alleviating the problems a little bit while we are waiting for the real economic infrastructure to be built.

Is this marketplace arrangement shortening the externality-limbo, or prolonging it? It might be raising awareness; it might be assuaging guilt. I don't know how the scale tips on that one.

I do know that when companies do something that simply makes them more efficient, it's clearly in their self-interest, so they should have been doing it already, Green or no Green. (Companies have been using fluorescent light bulbs for decades.) When they do it, and then trumpet themselves in the marketplace about it, it's a little sickening. That's my only problem with our green data center initiative. But I think it these kinds of semantic abuses go with the territory. The public wants to see these messages (for what I think are the right reasons). Companies are going to bring them these messages (for any old reasons).

----

not posted at work:

Some of course will claim that we *only* need the marketplace in this -- or any -- situation.  In this case, I think that idea barely merits a serious rebuttal.  The entire situation IS the rebuttal.

Groping toward better computer games

This talk (the slides are a decent substitute) tries to delve into what computer games really are -- at their mechanical, metaphysical level -- and turn that into some value judgments about what games should be (Hint: not World of Warcraft.)

Bruce Schneier, Security Guru extraordinaire, answers lots of questions

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/bruce-schneier-blazes-through-your-questions/

Q: Is there any benefit to password protecting your home Wifi network? I have IT friends that say the only real benefit is that multiple users can slow down the connection, but they state that there is no security reason. Is this correct?

A: I run an open wireless network at home. There's no password, and there's no encryption. Honestly, I think it's just polite. Why should I care if someone on the block steals wireless access from me? When my wireless router broke last month, I used a neighbor's access until I replaced it.

Google Presentations

First impressions of Google Presentations:

• Stripped-down. There's not much there there. Very modest selection of fonts, and only a few slide layouts.
• You can add images, move them around, and resize them, but absolutely nothing beyond that.
• A collection of slide "themes" is available, but I haven't yet seen a way that you could actually edit the themes, to make a custom "slide master".

If a large company (such as mine) were to eventually adopt a tool like this, I think the productivity (and usability) benefits would be substantial. Slide decks, as we know and love them today, suffer from the following problems:

• being emailed all over the place, and back again, despite the awkwardness of email attachments and our miniscule email storage budgets
• version confusion, due to having been emailed all over the place
• vulnerability to data loss due to living on peoples' laptops instead of "in the cloud"
• utter lack of access control (due to being emailed all over the place)
• an "orphaning" problem, where you have a deck that has lost its connection to its authors (or to any time and place at all).
• a lack of firm-wide consistency in layouts, styles, fonts, etc. Style compliance is voluntary, not built-in to the tool.
• sharing a presentation online, in real time, is accomplished only through complicated, expensive, and basically unpleasant 3rd-party tools like Centra and their ilk. In terms of sharing information and saving Accenture travel money, these kinds of presentations could be the mostly useful thing in the world; instead, they are something that people tend to avoid unless absolutely neceesary. I need an expense account (or a degree in computer science, or both) to show you my slides. Um, why IS that?

All these problems are dealt with -- or could be -- through a web-based approach to presentations. (Or through document-management systems, but history shows that that is just wishful thinking.) Just to take the last bullet point: instant online presentations. In Google Presentations, the first step is: click "start presentation". Second step: there's a URL in the corner; copy it and give it to someone (or many people). Third step: there is no third step.

There certainly may be online presentation apps that are richer than Google's, or more appropriate for the needs of the companies that actually run on PowerPoint (such as mine). I'm really more interested in the potential of this category than I am in Google's approach in itself. But I'll just note that the thing that's good about Google -- and bad about Microsoft or Centra or whomever -- is that they understand the virtue of simplicity. For instance, there a chat room built into the presentation view. But the entire chat room UI has exactly ONE BUTTON. To compare and contrast, do an images search for "centra".

Process Explorer

Like a lot of people, I am occasionally (or often) mystified by the behavior of Microsoft Windows. There's a fellow called Mark Russinovich who is seldom as confused as I am -- in fact, he's totally on top of it. He is the one who found the Sony rootkit last year, for example. His company (now bought by MSFT) makes various useful system utilities (such as psexec). Here is a Russinovich tool I just found out about: Process Explorer. It's the Task Manager on steroids.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/processesandthreads/processexplorer.mspx

Process Explorer is an advanced process management utility that picks up where Task Manager leaves off. It will show you detailed information about a process including its icon, command-line, full image path, memory statistics, user account, security attributes, and more. When you zoom in on a particular process you can list the DLLs it has loaded or the operating system resource handles it has open. A search capability enables you to track down a process that has a resource opened, such as a file, directory or Registry key, or to view the list of processes that have a DLL loaded.

My friend used this tool to discover that his Intel Proset Wireless drivers write 2.6 MB of data to disk, every twenty seconds or so, forever. Nice!

Can you redesign the Bloomberg terminal?

Three design studios had a crack at it, at the bidding of Conde Nast and their (physically) enormous new financial magazine, Portfolio.


http://www.portfolio.com/infographics/2007/06/terminals


What really surprises me is how shallow these designs are -- they don't seem tied to a meaningful sense of what the users actually DO all day with their Bloomberg terminals. One design takes away the user's keyboard and replaces it with . . . a puck. Why??

More generally, this exercise reveals (at least to my mind) that there's a lot of learning left to be done in the area of large screens. In IDEO's design, as users "drill down [on the left], new information is added to the right". Based on how big these screens are, this would have strange effects. When you're working with a small graphic element on a surface, you don't expect (or really want) the consequences of your action to show up 24 inches away. This would have you swiveling your head back and forth all the time like someone in the front row of a tennis match.

Text Flow

This is either snake oil or something completely and utterly cool.

http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/r_walker/




Abstract

A new process, visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF), transforms block-shaped text into cascading patterns that help readers identify grammatical structure. The new method integrates converging evidence from educational, visual, and cognitive research, and is made feasible through computer-executed algorithms and electronic displays. Among college readers, the VSTF method instantly increased reading comprehension and efficiency of reading online text, while reducing eyestrain. Among high school students, who read with the format over an entire academic year, the VSTF method increased both academic achievement and long-term reading proficiency by more than a full standard deviation over randomized controls.

Grafx

Have you noticed that on the Windows platform, there is a huge gap in functionality between Adobe Photoshop and, oh, I don't know, what's the next thing down the list . . . MSFT PAINT? And yet people somehow get a lot of light graphics work done. Maybe PowerPoint helps people shoot the gap, I'm not sure. For me, it's typically Photoshop or nothing, despite the fact that Photoshop is just way too much tool, most of the time.

Well, it turns out there IS a reasonable middle ground. One program I found there yesterday is called Paint.NET. It was created at the University of Washington, originally as a student project, but apparently Microsoft contributed some help as well.

Paint.NET site

It's free & open, but it doesn't have that dog-eared open-source look about it -- it's a nice program. It does layers, and has reasonably helpful help. I kinda like it. It's very much a paint program, not a drawing program -- once I draw a rectangle on the canvas, the rectangle becomes pixels, not a shape.

Which raises a question: is there a medium-feature-set, free alternative to Illustrator?

Violin

Fascinating article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

I'm not sure the right response is to wring our hands, but it does
give food for thought.

Comments about command lines

My response to http://www.humanized.com/weblog/2007/02/24/your_grandmothers_command_line_the_command_line_co/, about the maybe-rise (again) of command line interfaces.


To follow Tim's comment, I would like to see you talk more, perhaps in a future piece, about the specific design choices you made for Enso. I understand -- and support -- the general idea of the keyboard as a renewed & rejuventated interface device. Like many of your readers here, I too use Quicksilver, AppRocket, etc. So I get the big picture.

But about the *details* of Enso . . . one interesting choice is that you impose specific commands (such as "open"). This seems like a huge break from the world of "launchers", a step into the territory of command-lines that actually have commands (e.g. bash). I'm curious to know what you are aiming to gain by that? How would you compare yourself to something like Quicksilver, which is goes beyond launching, into the terrain of Unix pipes, but without a verbal command syntax such as "open" or "calculate"? Quicksilver seems to be managing to give the users the power of complex actions, without requiring them to learn a vocabulary of explicit synonyms for those actions. (Thus, in QuickSilver, to "calculate" something, you don't have to use the word "calculate" -- you enter in a calculation and it just does it.)

Another design choice of yours, which I do think is pretty innovative, is the ability of Enso to grab user-selected stuff from other programs. Does this go beyond (demoable but perhaps ultimately limited) plain-text selection? Do you see this ability growing into an important part of your tool?


---------------------------------------

My response to http://www.humanized.com/weblog/2007/03/05/are_adaptive_interfaces_the_answer/, about adaptive interfaces such as Microsoft's "adaptive menus" in Office -- now defunct.


I do have a small point to make about customizable user interfaces. Which is this: their praises are often sung by hard-core users, the kind of users who do similar work, on a single machine, for years on end. Their work is focused, and even somewhat repetitive. What they love, above all things, are shortcuts.

But be aware that catering to one user clique may hurt you in a wider marketplace. A *lot* of people in the world use more than one computer in a day. Others have to take account of the fact that others will use their computer sometimes. And a third, very large, group of people don't view computers as something to be customized, so they never go an inch down that road regardless of the rewards.

Customization -- feathering one's nest -- only pleases the base. Does Enso allow you to create your own commands? I'd argue that in the end it's completely unimportant. Let them eat emacs.

Conforming to the user, however -- that is golden.

MSFT just did it wrong, as usual.

Medieval Islamic Tiling

Q: How do can you tile a surface with shapes that have 5-fold or 10-fold symmetry? (A square has 2-fold symmetry -- it's obviously easy to tile a surface with squares.) How can you do it without a compass or a straightedge (which, as the pattern becomes larger and more complex, would cause errors to accumulate and distort the pattern)? "Girih patterns" from 15th century Islamic architecture demonstrate how it's done.

PDF of a physics paper from Harvard figuring it out.

Dark Room and Write Room

There's a very, very, very simple (and free) text editor called Dark Room . . . . puts me in mind of AppleWorks. (The old AppleWorks.) WriteRoom is a similar program, for Windows.

So far I have used this to help me write a 3000 word article and NOT check my email.

As much.

Circuit Bending

I really recommend the upcoming "Circuit Bending" workshop at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. It's tres fun. The teacher Patrick is a fairly zany Chicago-artist alley-diver type, with a yen for taking children’s toys and dementing them, sonically speaking. I like him a lot.

http://www.oldtownschool.org/workshops

---------------------------------

Take apart your old toys and make a brand new musical instrument! Circuit bending is the art of modifying existing electronics (like children's toys, guitar effects units, inexpensive battery-powered instruments, etc.) to create unique musical instruments by adding wires, knobs, and switches to control new connections within the device's pre-existing circuitry. Enjoy bizarre sounds, electronic loops, sampling, distortion. At the end, you’ll be able to identify and name parts of a circuit board. You'll also open a battery-powered device safely, explore its circuitry, install an output jack, switches, body contacts (and more!), and control new sounds like pitch, randomizing sound generation, distortion, (and more!).

Sharing Snippets

http://webworkerdaily.com/2006/10/11/googles-little-scriptlet-of-big-ideas/

"Apparently, Google encourages all its employees to send things they learnt or want to share with coworkers as a snippet of five lines - no less, no more. The employees have to be very precise and focused. It can be anything from executing a simple task or if they figured out a better way of doing something that is part of their daily work. Or just an aha moment. All they have to do is email it in. Google then indexes all these emails and makes them searchable. Think of it as giant FAQ database about Google by Googlers."

Many Eyes

Visualization-sharing page, started by Martin Wattenberg, who is one of IBM research's big viz people & the inventor of, among other things, the Baby Name Voyager.

http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home

Many Eyes seems to be meant as a place where people can share data sets, as well as viz techniques.

The visualization of U.S. Government expenditures (the only one I've looked at so far) is really interesting and nicely done. And with Java runtime 6 installed on my Vista machine at work, it is surprisingly fast, too.

Enso

I think I've posted in the past about about LaunchBar, Quicksilver, AppRocket and some similar software tools: handy, easy-to-use keyboard launchers -- essentially very light, on-demand command lines -- that really help you circumvent a lot of tedious mousework in the GUI. I think they represent a real step forward in user interfaces.

There is a new entrant in this category -- coming out of a Chicago-based startup, no less. It's called Enso.

Humanized

...from an email about "Web 2.0/RIA"

I think it's worth noting, for the record, that "Web 2.0" technologies are not the same as RIA technologies RIA (Rich Internet Application) technologies such as Writely or Gmail, though in the subject line of this email they are connected by a slash character. There are a veritable gaggle of web2.0 developments that don't involve rich browser applications. e.g. del.icio.us, flickr, digg, the tools at 37signals.com, etc. This myriad of new tools seems to revolve around a certain idea (though it is hard to get people to agree on the formulation of that idea). It has something to do with user participation, user-generated content, and a style of thinking about the web in a somewhat new way.

What is that new way? For my money, web2.0 is about a mass of people realizing that they can treat the web as a platform (not as a collection of pages).

What would this mean. Well, take your bookmarks list, in your web browser. There it is. You can bookmark stuff. If the web is a platform, then why not synthesize a "web page" out of your bookmarks list, so you can access it from any computer. Why not make it publicly available (when that makes sense) to your friends and contacts, so they can benefit from your bookmarks, and you can share in theirs. After all, that's what the web is good at.

And we can go a step further, and loosen our grip on the "web page" idea. . . .Why not break down the "bookmarks web page" into little chunks, so that if people want to subscribe to it as a "feed", they can receive your new bookmarks as you mint them. And they can receive them not just in a web browser, but as little emails, or text messages, or any other crazy way they want to get them. It can be up to them.

Also, why not encourage you, the bookmarker, to add a little bit of keyword tagging to your bookmark when you make it, so that people can browse and search around the big pool of everybody's bookmarks, by means of these keyword tags. If some of your bookmarks are marked "recipe" and some are marked "archery", that simple act actually provides a powerful lever to help everyone sift and sort the mass of bookmarks being created every day by all users.

OK, so that's del.icio.us vs a bookmarks file. Web 1.0, meet Web 2.0.

Some clever people had their minds wrapped around the web-as-platform idea from the beginning, of course, which is why plenty of web2.0ish ideas have been around, in fragmentary form, since the inception of the web. And that's why so many clever people are out there curmudgeoning about web2.0 now -- cuz they thought of it first.

Of course they did. But the thing is, Web 2.0 isn't a set of thoughts; it's a set of thoughts that make little sense until a critical mass of people starts to think those thoughts together. Sort of like doing double-dutch jumping roping: you need people to hold the ends of the ropes. Web2.0 is the social phenomenon we see as a critical mass of people starts to grasp the idea of the web as a platform. The idea of del.icio.us -- and it's a fairly slippery, web-centric idea -- is quite normal now to a few million people. Its becoming a normal idea IS the "revolution" (if one is required) of web2.0. It simply wasn't a normal idea in 1995, except among a small coterie of people. So people could have built del.icio.us back then, technologically speaking, but it would be a party that nobody comes to.

(There del.icio.us back in 1995. The people who really understood what the web could do, back then, might have been clever (I styled myself one of them), but they weren't so clever as to build a single one of the tools that we now see in ascendance. I do recall that SixDegrees was a lame attempt to do something like Friendster . . . by email!!!)

An analogy occurs to me between web2.0 and another reviled marketing term: rock and roll. Musical purists will say that the basic elements of rock and roll can be found in sources A, B, and C, far predating the popularity of rock and roll or the coining (appropriating, actually) of the term "rock and roll". But I think everybody sort of knows now, on some level, that rock and roll isn't purely an innovation in musical form: it's also a social upheaval in which a large mass of people embraces that musical innovation. And even the purists will probably grant that a mass audience was needed -- the wide currency of rock and roll ideas was needed -- to bring the music into its fullest development, in the following decade.

I think the same is true here.

Response to the New York Times Reader Application

To the New York Times Reader designers,

The Reader is exciting! I think that it's the most significant step that newspapers have taken on the web, since the building of the first newspaper websites. Congratulations.

However, I'm concerned about one feature of the interface: its confusing spatial logic. The Reader is already a spatialized way of looking at a collection of documents. And it already has a definite logic of the spatial relations between various documents. But the spatial system the designers have chosen is, unfortunately, hard to intuit and hard to rely on, because it violates conventional spatial reality; it violates user expectation; and it seems not entirely consistent within itself, at least logically. With some simple changes to the way that pages appear to be connected to one another, you could improve the Reader greatly.

There are two sources of spatial feedback built into the interface you have: which direction a page scrolls in from during the animated page transitions; and which arrow key direction (or arrow button direction) the user applies. These two spatial determinants combine -- or might -- to give a user a gut-level sense of "where they are". (Or, they interfere, or and the user doesn't have that sense.)

To walk through how the current spatial logic works (or doesn't), take the experience of reading a multi-page news article. The software seems to encourage people to use the arrow keys to navigate in this case, since you made the "page down" arrows so small and hard to hit with the mouse. That's a reasonable design choice. The DOWN arrow takes me farther "down" into the article.

(Personally, I would suggest that the article extend to the RIGHT instead (perhaps even pulling in *one column at a time* as it did so, instead of flipping whole pages at a time -- conserving the user's visual context at all times. Please try out the Macintosh text-reader called "Tofu" to see what I mean. http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/index.shtml))

However, your designers chose DOWN, so down it is. At least the direction of movement matches the arrow key, thus far.

Once I reach the end of article A, pressing the DOWN key takes me to the next article, article B. Firstly, that's somewhat unexpected, since the down icon was dimmed. Secondly, despite my pressing the DOWN arrow, the article moves in from the RIGHT, as though I had pressed the right arrow. Spatial factor 1 (animation) didn't match factor 2 (arrow key).


If the article had scrolled in from the bottom, I might think of myself as continuing to go "down" the stack of articles. But instead I need to think of myself as going "right", across a row of articles. Evidence for this is that if I press the LEFT key, I go back to (the first page of) article A. So article A is "to the left of" article B, in your layout. (What is the relation of these two articles to their section header page? As it turns out, I have to go from article B, through article A, to get back to the section header -- which is too bad. If the section header was "above" all its articles, then pressing UP from the first page of any article would get me back there.)

Back at article B, though. If instead of pressing LEFT, I press the UP key (the reverse of the DOWN key that brought me from the end of article A to the start of article B), I go back to . . . the start of article A. Not the end. But wouldn't it make more sense to go back to the end? All I'm trying to do is to reverse the action I took -- I went DOWN, now I want to go UP -- but that didn't get me back to where I was. That's unintuitive.

(Also, the page scrolled in from the left; consistent with your layout, but disobedient of my directional input.) If I really do want to go back to the last page of article A, I now have to scroll forward through the whole article again. (Or pick up the mouse and click the Back button.)

It may sound like a lot of small details, but I think these details add up, and either support users' spatial intuitions, or muddle those intuitions. The principle of coherency would suggest at least the following rules of engagement:

1. Actions should be reversible. The opposite of left should be right; the opposite of up should be down, like in the real world.

2. The direction of animation (spatial factor 1) should always match the direction the user asked to go in (spatial factor 2). To support users' spatial intuitions, we should avoid surprising them about where they will end up when they do something.

It would be better to temporarily disable a key than to map it to a non-intuitive action. (You do this on the front page, in fact; the UP arrow does nothing there, which is good. Unfortunately, on that page, the left arrow animates the page over to . . . itself! Why?)

For coherency, the "back" and "forward" arrows suffer some of the same problems as the physical arrow keys, because they seem to suggest a spatial direction -- forward and back. (Back always points left.) When I press the "Forward" arrow, the new page slides in from the right, which does match intuition. But when I press the "Back" arrow, which points LEFT, the page again slides in from the RIGHT -- exactly the opposite of expectation. Maybe the "back" button should follow the user's trail -- through the space of documents -- exactly according to the path they followed, whether they went up, down, left, or right. That would be a powerful wayfinding device that I think even the most casual users would notice and appreciate. Perhaps the button icon could point in the direction that it would actually take the user. The words "retrace steps" or "go back" would have to be written underneath the button. The forward button might get similar treatment.

By releasing the Reader as a version of the New York Times, you are trying to (continue to) transition readers away from a physical object which has, among other things, strong spatial logic (a product of careful human design) and perfect spatial consistency (a product of physics). To win over users who are not computer experts, if you give users a spatial design, you should make sure you don't betray users' built-in spatial intuitions, which a real newspaper never does. The fact that software frequently undermines users is one of the reasons many people don't understand, for example, their own file system. (Please check out John Siracusa's critiques of the current Macintosh operating system interface on arstechnica.com for detailed arguments in favor of (consistently) spatial software. http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/finder.ars/3)

If you were inspired to test spatial effects (and are blessed with testing staff and budget), a couple of simple experiments could reveal users' intuitions about the interface (or lack thereof). Have study participants read the news at their own pace and discrection, but interrupt them at various points, to ask them "If you press the right arrow {or back button, or space bar, or whatever} right now, what do you think you will see?" Measure how often users are wrong. You might also try think-aloud studies, where users talk about their browsing intentions. Try to get them to say aloud, "I'm going to go to the next article now", or, "I'm going to go back to the front page now". See exactly how many mistakes they make; how often do they do what they're trying to do on the first try? My claim is that in the current setup, there will be many mistakes.

I personally think a good spatial setup would be if articles were purely horizontal -- they extended to the right, instead of downwards. The right arrow takes you through an article to its end. Then it doesn't do anything -- it's disabled. The next article is always "below" the one you're reading now. The down arrow takes you to that "next" article, which slides in from the bottom. When you get to the bottom of a stack of articles, the down arrow doesn't do anything -- it's disabled. Going LEFT from the first page of an article -- any article -- takes you to the section heading. (Perhaps there's a special indicator on the left hand edge of the screen that makes this clear.) I think this would be an arrangement (one of many possible) that users would intuitively grasp, even if they did not consciously ascertain -- and this could be seen in the results of the experiment outlined above.

But barring that suggestion and sticking closer to your current arrangement, I contend that simply imposing some order and consistency on what you already have would still yield measurable benefits.


sincerely,
BLWH


P.S. Other notes:

1. The Macintosh user community would have been a natural fit for this application -- please don't leave them out in the cold entirely. I realize the appeal of developing this application with WPF, but if the downside is the total exclusion of a prime user base, the price is too high.

2. Are you getting any positive feedback on the "Show What's Read" widget? I would be surprised if it turns out to be valuable. Having to exert so much fine motor control over the mouse to hover over such small targets, just to read a handful of headlines (one per tiny target) seems like meager benefit for such (relatively) high UI effort. Couldn't you simply write the headlines in a small font and pack them together somehow? Then the UI effort would be zero, and information density would go up. If I want to read one, I move my mouse to only one tiny target: the one that I want.

Article in Mother Jones

Sara Shipley Hiles, the spouse of Sarah's uncle Tom, has a big feature article out in the new Mother Jones. The print issue doesn’t come out till next week, but you can read it on-line. Sara went to Peru to do the work for this piece. It's pretty amazing.


http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/11/lead_astray.html

New long-term study of TV watching and autism in children

http://www.slate.com/id/2151538/nav/tap1

Today, Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders.

The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society: A blog

Good, weird stuff. Like reading the Guiness Book of World Records in elementary school.

http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/

The March of Technology

I'm sure I'm not the only person pointing this out, but . . .


The Onion, Feb 18, 2004.  http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930?issue=4228&special=2004


CNN Money, Sept 14, 2006.  http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/14/news/fortune500/gillette/

Nota Bene

from the Times today . . .

Don't sign the back of your credit card, advised the Straight Dope (straightdope.com), the longtime wisdom-dispenser for readers of alternative newspapers. "However," writes "Ken," a Straight Dope staffer, "do not leave the white stripe blank. In that space, write: 'Ask For Picture ID.'"

my favorite blog right now

thelittleplum.blogspot.com

Still Life with Glasses

A short film called Me; 3 years of daily photographs of a person's face, spooled into one clip.  I read the concept and thought it would be interesting.  In fact, it's completely amazing.

Juan Lopez and John Ward

I was sent the following Borges poem in translation, and, being a little dissatisfied with the translation, knocked out a slightly different one. Here for Google -- or for you -- to find it:


Juan Lopez and John Ward

They were fated into a strange time.

The planet was parcelled into different lands
each with its provision of loyalties, of
fond remembrances, of a past without a
doubt heroic, of rights, of insults, of a
special mythology, and eminences in bronze,
of anniversaries, demagogues, and emblems.
This division, beloved of mapmakers,
bred war.

López had been born in the city by the still river;
Ward, on the outskirts of the city on the path
of Father Brown. He had studied Castilian
so as to read Quixote.

The other professed a love for Conrad, a revelation
from a lecture hall on Viamonte Avenue.

Possible friends, they were only face to face
a single time, on an island overly exposed,
and each of them was Cain, and each was Abel.

Buried together, they are known now to the snow,
and to dissolution.

What I tell here occurred in a time beyond our ken.

- Jorge Luis Borges, Sept. 1982

John Muir

I just assume people know about John Muir. Do you know about John Muir?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Muir

In Praise of eMusic

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/emusic.ars

Nota bene: the game with eMusic is always selection. They lack tons of things. They also have tons of things. Recently added: all of White Stripes.

43 Things

Not to be confused with the website 43folders, which is about making you more productive, 43 Things is a way to make half an hour disappear. But it's not lost time.

You make a new account, and type in a little list of things you want to do (i.e. go to China, learn to juggle). Then comes the Internet part. There are lots of other people who want to do the same things . . . or have already done them. Suddenly, all those people can brush against each other, around the common token of "I want to do X" or even "I wanted to do X, and I did it". And they can talk to each other. That's the idea, anyway.

Is a site like this -- high-minded, let's agree -- mostly a proving ground for features that will eventually be incorporated into MySpace? (I wonder the same about del.icio.us and flickr, and the others.) And when that happens, will said features be instantly perverted into a way of idolizing celebrities or reinscribing some petty high school pecking order? That is not my problem. By that point I will be "hik[ing] the appalachian trail" or "travel[ling] around the world".

TYGER: a video? a movie?

This video is completely cool. The most interesting 3 minutes of my day by far.

Re: iPod Hi-Fi. Home stereo. Reinvented.

AE wrote:

Do you have the iPod boombox?  Have you heard this, and if so, how does it sound?

I don't have it, and I have not heard it, though I believe them when they say that it sounds good.  It is also 300-some bux.

What I do have is this:

http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000468.php

Cheap, sturdy, weatherproof, built-in rechargeable battery pack instead of D-cell batteries, and IT HAS A RADIO!

A fresh take on explaining quantum computation

No cats are threatened in the course of this explanation of quantum behaviors and computations.

People of the Coasts: Moisten One Another

StreetWars: A 3 week long watergun assassination tournament - NYC, Vancouver, Vienna, San Francisco. AE, you should do this.

Principal dangers, as I see them, in order: getting arrested for breaking and entering. Gettting shot for breaking and entering. (This game will not be coming to Texas.) PATRIOT Act and all that it implies. Giving someone a heart attack.

What Saints Protect you From What

OR,

how Sarah and I will be selecting the name of our unborn child! How to choose whether to be protected against "rats", shielded from the possibility of "rupture", or maybe immunity to "scurf"?

Patron Saints Index Topic List

Protected groups with their own saints include:

disappointing children
gas station workers
computers
Chilean Army
Chilean Navy
chimney sweeps
fireworks manufacturers

game theory is fun.

and gendered.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/26/business/26scene.html

Re: music genome project

http://pandora.com/

I have used this. It's fun, and it has actually suggested music to me which I went out and bought.

That said, the music genome project seems to classify music on strictly formal grounds -- male or female vocals, slow or fast rhythms, etc. Which is fine and good (I'm quite the formalist myself, as any of my cultural studies friend will attest), but it doesn't give the system any ability to distinguish between two bands producing similar-sounding, similarly-structured music, where one piece of music is good, and the other is crap.

Of course, most people can't make this distinction, either, which accounts for the popularity of openly derivative, openly crappy content such as, say, Candlebox, or the Monkees.

Reply from a friend:

Yes, what it boils down to is that Pandora - and any other service or person - can only suggest tracks based on measurable well-defined properties. Whether it is good or bad music will be a matter of personal taste (with a few undeniable exceptions).

And sometimes Pandora is just plain wrong: I entered Goldfrapp as the search term, and Pandora came up with songs by Ace of Base and Belinda Carlisle!

My response:

I was being a bit tongue in cheek -- of course value questions such as "good" vs. "crap" are subjective. However, there are ways that the system could try to use "quality" (or at least the chronology of musical variation) as one of its axes, as it tries to guess what to play next.

• Get album or artist ratings from the web (Amazon, emusic.com, or elsewhere), using them as a raw index of "quality".
• Text-mine music journalism archives for positive reviews, possibly weighing these against the popular opinion. Perhaps the system's profile of the listener should include the listener's likelihood of agreeing with the Amazon crowd, the eMusic crowd, the Pitchfork crowd, the Rolling Stone crowd . . . .
• More interestingly, do some more detailed language processing on the text of all those reviews, looking for particular language, such as sentence forms built around verbs "inspired by", "derived from", "echoes", etc. From that, the system might infer that certain music emerges from other music. Whether the listener prefers the early example of something (Television, Velvet Underground) or later examples of something similar (The Strokes) could also be part of their profile.
• By default, the system could try to give priority to earlier examples of a particular form, or form combinations, such as close female harmony/electric guitar. Unless a later example of that formula is clearly highly-rated (using some of the above metrics), the earlier stuff should be weighted more heavily, since it is probably more original music, and perhaps of higher overall musical value.

I Use BaseCamp

"...an alphabetically sorted list of popular Web 2.0 applications. The description for each of the application is taken from their own About or FAQ pages."


http://virtualkarma.blogspot.com/2006/01/complete-list-of-web-20-applications.html

Leia Bell: Print Maker, Poster Maker, Painter

We are tres excited. Got numbered prints for Decemberists and Shins shows.

Leia Bell site
Leia Bell interview

Cool Tools

This site is still an open secret. Kevin Kelly (of Wired fame) compiles people's recommendations to him -- recommendations about cool stuff. Since KK has a bushel of interesting friends, the Cool Tools site links to a bushel of interesting objects. Audio equipment, shoes, walkie talkies, books on backpacking, crafts, CAD software, pens . . . finding hot springs in Japan . . . railways converted to bicycle trails in North America . . . accurate rulers . . . a tool for making an igloo. . .

A place to start before buying, or doing, any sort of thing.

Carbon footprint calculator

A tool on the BP website lets you figure a rough estimate of your household yearly CO2 emissions. I think Sarah and I clock in at about 12 tons, against the US average of 19. Air travel accounts for a surprisingly large chunk of that.

Friday Macintosh Uppitiness

Some people still think there's parity between the Mac experience and the Windows experience. This man's screenshots humbly beg to differ. 3 steps to sync a cellphone to a Mac, 11 steps for Windows.

My personal case in point: make a little movie in iMovie, make the same movie in Windows Movie Maker. Take blood pressure test after each.

The future is now!

Automatic milking machine movies: lasers! robots! teats! Must be seen.

Institute of Cultural Inquiry

Institute of Cultural Inquiry

"Objects of interest to Institute Associates have included photographs taken by W.G. Sebald, newspaper articles about AIDS, taxidermied and pickled mammals including monkey heads, a manual of lost ideas, found footage from a 1945 film, sound mirrors, the Narrenturm, video projections with a president apologizing for everything, mystic writing pads, and dream-dredging devices. Systems and methods of thought that have guided Institute research include excavation, curation, hypnotism, souveniring, animal and botanical revisionism, ventriloquism, divination, aerial navigation, and museum installation."

The AIDS Chronicles project is interesting.

Museum of Forgery

a little baffling

Experiences with OpenOffice 2.0 Writer

As as alternative to MS Word, I've been using OpenOffice 2.0 Writer on my Windows machine for about four days now. I had tried other free alternatives to Word before, notably AbiWord. But none of those experiments have lasted longer than a few days. AbiWord, for example, doesn't display all fonts at the same size and spacing as Word; I care about fonts, and I need precision. Also, AbiWord occasionally crashes on me outright. OpenOffice has been stable. Its memory footprint is reasonable, at about 30 MB (a bit smaller than Word), and its performance seems snappy enough.

In the time I've been using OpenOffice Writer, I've produced and edited documents of only medium complexity. I do use columns quite a bit (see my back articles for why), fonts, and list indenting. On the other hand, I haven't been using features like mail merge, tables of contents, footnotes, or embedded tables. No macros, either. But then, the last time I touched one of those features, or did something with a macro, was, oh, 2001, and I suspect the same may be true of you, dear reader.

One important note about file format: when saving documents from OpenOffice, it still seems wise to use the standard .doc format. I would naturally use the Microsoft-Word-compatible XML format instead, of course. By being a plain text format, it's more transparent, potentially readable by other tools, and it starts to wrest us away from those hoary old proprietary binary formats which lock users into one platform. Bring it on.

But sadly, OpenOffice's support for the XML format is flaky -- by using it, I quickly lost a couple of words from the top of two columns. As an additional unruliness, OpenOffice frequently opens XML documents as read-only, for no good reason. So I'm sticking with .doc for now.

Where to eat lunch in downtown Chicago

It's a more vexing problem than you might think.

http://www.lunchintheloop.com/index.asp

Interesting paragraph from something called the "Concise Encyclopedia of Economics"

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/StockPrices.html

"Over time, the total return on stocks has exceeded that of any other class of asset. This is shown in [the chart below], which compares the total returns to stocks, long- and short-term government bonds, gold, and commodities (measured by the consumer price index). One dollar invested in stocks in 1802 would have grown to $1,250,000 in 1991, in bonds to $6,920, in Treasury bills to $2,830, and in gold to $14.20. The consumer price index has risen by a factor of 10.4, almost all of it after World War II. One dollar invested in 1802 would have grown, in inflation-adjusted dollars, to $109,000 in stocks, $605 in bonds, $248 in Treasury bills, and $1.24 in gold."

DevonTHINK -- is this useful?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/business/yourmoney/04techno.html?th&emc=th

More ink about DevonTHINK today in the NYT. I go back and play with the program some more every time it pops up in the press, as it seems like something that would be right up my alley, but it never seems to make much sense to me. Today, I thought I'd actually try to figure it out.

It's simple enough on the face of it, anyway. DevonTHINK is a keeper for snippets (of all kinds). It allows instant searching, cross-referencing, even a sort of associative clustering, within the collection. Steven Berlin Johnson was eloquent on its powers earlier this year:

http://www.devon-technologies.com/files/reviews/nyt%202005-01.pdf

People report some overlap with EndNote, the bibliographic management tool that humanities grad students use to get their dissertations wrangled. I believe the difference is (correct me here) EndNote is for just one kind of entry: bibliographic. DevonTHINK can do text, PDF, doc, RTF, images, word, etc. It also has a web browser built into it, enabling it to directly reach out and grab things from the web (and save them off into its collection).

Also, EndNote has only a workaday notion of keyword search. DevonTHINK is fancy: its search is informed by semantics, meaning that searching for "dog" will turn up documents that mention "canines", or even documents with words that frequently co-occur with "dog", such as "tired." This sort of information retrieval style is not new, but it is new and cool in the context of the desktop computer and a personal collection of files.

But DevonTHINK carries what looks to me like an albatross. As near as I can tell, the way DevonTHINK works is to keeps its collection of files in one big file, separate from the original versions of things. If I put a text document into DevonTHINK, the program stores a copy of it. And if (nay, when) the original document changes . . . the change is not reflected in DevonTHINK. I must go back and re-add the file to the collection. DevonTHINK does not keep the 2 versions in sync!

If so, there's little point in putting, say, an email archive into DevonTHINK, because an email archive grows and changes all the time, and DevonTHINK remains unaware of growth and change. Likewise for new documents I'm working on; the new IM chats I'm constantly generating; new files I'm downloading; new podcasts; new videocasts; new songs; . . . if the user doesn't manually put each and every item into DevonTHINK, as it changes or appears, the database has holes. So now, to find things, the user has to search in two places now: inside DevonTHINK, and outside. Inside, cool associative semantic search. Outside, none.

And if that's so, then DevonTHINK seems more or less useless for realtime information management -- instead, it's really best suited for managing a specially designated, static library of stuff such as Steven Berlin Johnson's carefully compiled archive of research articles and snippets. (Which he has a research assistant help him with, by the way.) Such an archive must be manually built and pruned, when one has the time, and when one remembers to, and if one has the interest to even get started.

What DevonTHINK sounds like to my ears, but turns out not to be, is EndNote on crack, for the whole hard drive and for all the files. And I would indeed like that. Also, it would always be on, requiring no investment from the user. When I search for "Christmas" amongst my stuff, I'd like pictures from Christmas time, chats that mention "xmas" lists, brand new Christmas songs from my library (even ones that don't explicitly mention the word Christmas), a Christmas slide show from long ago (again, not mentioning Christmas explicitly, but containing pictures that are Christmasy), recipes for Glogg (might not mention Christmas), calendar entries around Christmas time, the text of "A Christmas Carol" as well as the PDF sheet music for some carols, caroling, etc. But not Adam Carolla. This all is pretty low-hanging fruit, but hard stuff to get at with keyword search. Mac OS X Tiger's Spotlight search might get half of these items -- the most literal search hits. But there's no semantics, and thus, no associative power.

Perhaps what's really needed, to scratch the itch that DevonTHINK begins to scratch, is an associative search tool that works on top of Spotlight's API. The democratic approach would, in this case, actually work better: there would be no special database, no walled garden maintained by some proprietary tool. Spotlight is built into the OS, and it already has a complete index of every file; what's really cool is that it updates the index instantly every time any file changes. So Tool X, by invoking Spotlight and re-processing and expanding its output, would work in realtime, and it could provide all kinds of associations by theme or term or similarity. Even throw in some clustering and a little visualization for good measure, so I can drift through my files purely on the basis of semantic connections . . . .now the filesystem could actually start to look a little different than it has since 1985.

For Windows, a similar thing might be done on top of the Google Desktop Search tool, if their API is accessible and has its hooks deep enough into the OS.

Blocking Credit Card Junk Mail

It turns out that there is a mechanism in place that will stop credit card offers from constantly appearing in one's mailbox. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, credit card companies must give people the opportunity to "Opt Out" of those offers. I found the site where you can do that.

https://www.optoutprescreen.com

So, What is optoutprescreen.com and is it Legit?

"Many people have wondered if this is a legitimate website and not just a scam itself. While the website is very basic, it is secured by 128bit SSL to protect the information you send. Optoutprescreen.com is actually what it appears to be and that is a way to get off those mailing lists. Yes, they do ask you for your social security number, however, they need to be able to verify your identity. "

Hydrogen injection for 18-wheel trucks

http://www.wired.com/news/autotech/0,2554,69529,00.html?tw=rss.TOP



"HFI is a bolt-on, aftermarket part that injects small amounts of hydrogen into the engine air intake, said Canadian Hydrogen Energy's Steve Gilchrist. Fuel efficiency and horsepower are improved because hydrogen burns faster and hotter than diesel, dramatically boosting combustion efficiency.



"HFI's manufacturer guarantees 10 percent fuel savings . . . Trucks with the HFI system produce half the amount of particulates -- microscopic, unburned bits of diesel. The system also reduces nitrogen-oxide emissions, which are major contributors to harmful air pollution, by up to 14 percent . . .


"The HFI units are relatively small and cost between $4,000 and $14,000, depending on the size of the vehicle."

Another beautiful thing from Jason Salavon

The Art Institute of Chicago: On the Scene: Jessica Rowe, Jason Salavon, Brian Ulrich


". . . in The Top Grossing Film of All Time 1 x 1, Salavon represents the color average of each individual frame of the 1997 film Titanic, all sequenced in a grid just as they occur in the film. . . "

A very fractal vegetable

chou Romanesco

People in Inflatable Suits Riding Bikes.

AEOLIAN RIDE

The riding of the bike seems to do the inflating. The pictures of this from the New York ride are actually quite beautiful.

Bags

Hip SoCal kinds of bags, by one of AE's friends. I played bocce at her birthday party on Long Beach. Someone gave me a chilled bloody mary out of a tupperware jug, and it was really good. Buy these bags.

<< Silent Revolution >>

from the Interactive Arts department

I don't totally understand this yet, but I think it's pretty cool. Slinky digital erector sets.

sodaplay

Graphviz: draw a picture by writing a script

Seems like a good thing to be able to do sometimes. Why draw when you can code?

DRM Adrenaline Courses Through my Veins!

Check it.

http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html

"Some newer CDs from Sony BMG contain an antipiracy application that must be installed in order to play the CD on your Windows PC. Should the unwary consumer say "yes" to the license agreement, the application implants hooks into the Windows kernel to make sure you don't use the CD in a manner Sony doesn't approve of. Those hooks are undetectable unless you know exactly what you're looking for, and are all but impossible to uninstall apart from contacting Sony and requesting removal. Attempting to remove the software yourself will leave you with a nonfunctional CD-ROM drive. Heaven help you if you're running a beta of Vista. Sony's application will utterly hose your Vista install.

"What's even more infuriating is that Sony's rootkit provides a means of entry for other hackers to compromise your system (assuming they are able to gain access). All they have to do is use the same naming convention Sony's software uses. And even if your system is never compromised, you still have a process you didn't ask for taking up CPU cycles -- 1 to 2 percent even when your PC is otherwise idle."

This also serves notice as the start of a new mini-series: Why I (Still) Use Macintosh, Reason #2. Macs are (so far) unafflicted by DRM schemes such as Sony's.

Reason #1, which is closely related to the technical details of Sony's dishonest DRM scheme and the reasons why it works . . . is that there are no known viruses that affect the Macintosh. NONE. (There is no theoretical reason why there couldn't be one, but so far there are none.)

Multicore Processors will pwn

The current issue of ACM Queue is all about multicore processors. (Members of the ACM get a couple of magazines, Communications of the ACM, and Queue, which is more IT-related. I suppose they’re trying to reach both the Research and the Development sides of the ACM membership. Anyway, I bring this up because I seem to be the only person I know who ever opens these magazines. And indeed, they are often fairly boring, especially Queue.) But the newest issue of Queue has a lot of valuable analysis of multicore processing and its real-world impact. I would recommend that anyone even vaguely interested in multicore have a look at it.

Until now, even though I understood the broad outlines of multicore hardware, and some of its ramifications for software, I had not stopped to consider it as much more than a waystation on the path to more of the same of CPU evolution we’ve seen during my lifetieme: deeper chip pipelines, more pipelines, higher clock speeds, out-of-order execution and ever more clever optimization of such – basically, single-threaded Von Neumann computational destiny as we understand it. We all know there are serious hurdles along this path (not just problems, but equations, beady-eyed equations with ominously few terms.) But new materials come out, people talk about optical chips, diamond substrates . . . something good will come along. And why should multicore present a real shift in computing, when symmetric multiprocessing has been around for years?

Short answer: memory is still slow, so shared cache matters. But as a medium answer, I’ll briefly note a couple of the items that surprised me. Surprise #1 was an analysis by a Google engineer showing that electricity is now 40% of the total cost of ownership of a low-end server, which consumes 200-300 watts. This assumes electricity costs stay the same – if they go up, electricity may become more than half the TCO. The reason that power requirements have continued to grow is the way Intel has spent its transistor budget for the last five or ten years. Performance has grown, but performance per watt has stayed flat, so that each increase in processing speed has come with an increase in power consumption, making power a bigger and bigger factor in the cost of large-scale computing.

And this brings up Surprise #2: the notion that perhaps Intel has been _wasting_its_time_. The deeper and deeper pipelines, the prediction logic, all the things that they have spent their engineering budget on – and their power budget, their transistor budget, their chip fab budget – has been simply prolonging the megahertz race because that race was easy to market. A Google query – or any memory-intensive computing thread – would run almost as fast on a 500 Mhz chip as on a 2 GHz chip (!). The chips end up stalling waiting for memory anyway. But with multicore, four such 500 MHz chips can fit on the same size die, and for LOWER power costs, as the 2GHz chip. And they can share cache lines, possibly benfitting from each other’s memory fetches. So if the software is written smartly, the multicore setup will give four times the throughput as the 2Ghz chip. And I imagine it would be significantly cheaper as well in engineering and manufacturing terms.

So perhaps multicore is not a waystation – it might instead be the sign of having to go BACKWARDS (to lower megahertz and fewer pipelines, for example), in order to get out of a dead end.

But of course the software has to be written to take advantage of it, and apparently there's an amazing amount of work to be done. Something I won’t go into here is Surprise #3: Windows and even Linux have very coarse concurrency, though the move the multicore has been understood in the research community for years. To get anywhere with multicore, almost every line in an OS has to be reexamined for “serial” sections and OS-wide locking situations, and serious rewrites are in order. Which OS has already undergone this years-long process? Solaris. Will Sun be suddenly relevant?

(And might fine-grained concurrency be part of the reason we hear rumors that Google has its own version of Linux? Can anyone enlighten me?)

Site59.com

I might be late to the party on this but site59 seem like a good site to know about for making last minute travel plans.

Site59.com

And unlike some of the flexible-search tools out there (such as Orbitz), it works for international travel.

Public service announcement for Chicagoans who own their homes

I recently applied for the Homeowner's Exemption from the Cook County Treasurer's Office for the current tax year, and though I found it a somewhat difficult process, I did get it, and actually, it's not that hard if you know what you're doing (which I didn't). And it's very worth it. My yearly tax bill went down by over a thousand dollars this year. That is not a typo!

Here is basic information about what the Homeowner's Exemption is, from the Treasurer's Office:

http://www.cookcountytreasurer.com/exemptions.aspx?ntopicid=16

And here is how you look up the history of your property, with regards to that exemption. Very useful.

http://www.cookcountytreasurer.com/exemptions.aspx?ntopicid=15

There are two issues to look at if your property is not receiving the Exemption. The first issue is getting the Exemption on the books, for the current year (I think the "current" property tax year is 2004, oddly enough). The other issue is trying to get some kind of refund for past years in which the residence was owner-occupied, but the Exemption wasn't in place (a refund I believe you are eligible for, even if the owner was not you. As far as I can tell, the property tax system follows the property, not the person.)

So for the current year, you apply through the Assessor's Office, as it says on the first web page I linked to. Or, here is an online version of an Exemption booklet, containing forms you can simply print off and send in.

http://www.cookcountyassessor.com/filings/forms/2004exBooklet.pdf

Now, for past years, the following applies:

"Taxpayers who own property in the city of Chicago and would like help filing for a Certificate(s) of Error may visit the Chicago Tax Assistance Center in City Hall, Room 100, 121 North LaSalle Street, or call 312.744.1000."

If you call that number, you will probably get an extremely rude lady who will barely listen to your questions before abruptly hanging up on you. The funny thing is, she'll probably also send you the form you asked for, even if you didn't manage to ask for it before she hung up on you. This has happened to me two or three separate times.

If you're not interested in that experience, I think you can simply print out the Certificate Of Error Application form yourself at home, and send in one form for each past year when the exemption wasn't in place. Here is a link to that form. I just sent mine in this week, so I can't say how this part of the process actually turns out. But I have high hopes.

http://www.cookcountyassessor.com/forms/HoCofE.pdf

Best of luck.


Update:

Rejected!

I received my three applications back in the mail today. I must undergo another round with the Assessor's office, due to my limited understanding of the application process. Let's review the requirements to apply for a Certificate of Error, shall we? I'll summarize them here:

• "You must complete a Homeowner Exemption Certificate of Error Application for each year for which you are seeking a Certificate of Error."
  
• "You must submit a photocopy of one of the following:"
  
  
  
  1. A driver's license or state ID showing your address as the property address
     
  2. A voter's registration card or voting record from the tax year(s) for which you are applying
     
  3. A phone bill or letter from the phone company indicating the date of phone installation
     
  4. If neither 1., 2., nor 3. are available, a notarized affidavit from one person with personal knowledge (not the owner), stating that the property was owner occupied on January 1st of the year(s) for which you are applying.
     
  
  

So what did I submit? Three applications (satisfying the first section), and three separate notarized affidavits, written out by our condo management company, stating the required information (satisfying the second section).

Ah, but what did I receive? All my submitted paperwork, along with an enclosed photocopy of the above requirements, as I have shown them here. But a new item has been added -- written in ballpoint pen, actually -- reading "settlement statement".

One one of my applications is written, also in ballpoint pen, "We need one affidavit for all years stating the exact date that you moved in this property. Also include copy of settlement statement."

Make of this what you will! It is another trip to the notary for me. What are the REAL requirements to apply for a Certificate of Error? Only the shadow knows!

The fate of photorealism in computer games

Here's an article worth checking out about the inexorable push in video games towards more and more realism, more polygons, more complicated lighting models, richer textures.

http://modetwo.net/users/nachimir/vga/

The text is on the pompous and wordy side. The writer dances oafishly around the question of gameplay -- like, gameplay, as in, what is there FUN to do? Is Doom XII any better a game than Doom IV, despite the fact that, thanks to a new pixel shader model and a wider polygon pipeline, I can now see my bullet flashes reflected in the sweat beads on the cheekbones of the demon lizard, even though he's partly obscured by a tapestry of photorealistic unicorn hair? Hmm, I shot him, and he died. Huh. Now what?

But I do like the gallery of alternate-universe games: most of them I had never seen before. Don't know if I'd want to play in a world that looked like a pencil sketch all the time -- but who knows. It would be a nice to take a break from the lizard.

Small site about the big Wall

Friends might have already seen this, but a website I made to explain our current work is located at wall.accenture.com. There's a new demo reel on the "demos" page.

Due to subtleties of CSS that are beyond me, this site is not quite right in Firefox or Safari. :(

CommonCensus Map Project

Interesting mapping idea -- what do people feel, subjectively speaking, are the geographical spheres of influence in America? No results yet, but I voted.

CommonCensus Map Project

Saving the World thru Better Font Design

There was a New York Times article about this last year: the feds have given approval for the "Clearview" font to be used on all federal roadway signage. From the article:

'After the first tests, Mr. Montalbano made some final refinements, changing the height-to-width ratio of the letters and making the lowercase letters larger. Then, in April 2002, the designers tested the typeface again on the Pennsylvania track. The improvement over the current typeface was striking, they said. Or as Mr. Meeker put it: From 500 feet away, the current sign typeface "was already breaking up, but at 750 feet, the Clearview was still sharp."'

Here's the site which Montalbano created about ClearView: http://www.clearviewhwy.com/

New Nintendo controller

Nintendo's Revolution Controller revealed: http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3143782

Q: "what do you gamers think?"

A: I am surprised, that's for sure. But if you look at it as part of a trend toward more physically-intensive console games, I think it makes sense.

I was at a SIGGRAPH panel this year about the Future (!) of Game Interaction (!) (FUTURE! Future! future! . . . ). Most of the panelists were game reps with toys to show off. Nobody showed anything like the Nintendo thing, of course. But they did spend a lot of time on that dance mat wingding, and talked about how popular it is with the kids -- not a niche, as you might have thought, but a big hit in the game market.

So now there's a microphone that plugs into the console, and you can do karaoke with a live pitch detector that awards you points, based on how on-key you are. So they're pretty excited about that. And yes, there's a version of the dancing game that combined the two modes -- you have to sing and dance at the same time. One of the panelists at SIGGRAPH gave it a try for us.

But wait, there's more. Apparently the eyeToy (or whatever they're calling the little set-top camera/vision software) is also somewhat popular (another surprise to cynical me, who expected it to go the way of the glove or the VR headset). As far as I can tell, its ability to detect hand position in midair, as well as body or head leaning, is fairly robust. So you can lean in motorcycle games, for example. Or, in another twist on the dance mat/karaoke game, you can sing, dance, AND put your hands in the air so as to hit little virtual targets in time with the music. Again, a thirty-five year old white man tried this in front of a thousand people. He was really not too bad, considering he was trying to follow a Stevie Wonder scat line bend for bend AND throw his one free hand in the like he just didn't care. I have visions of of Embarassing Community Meeting Activities To Come (FUTURE! Future! future! . . . )

They didn't mention this explicitly, but I gather that these kinds of physicalized, even literalized, games, and these kinds of interactions (read the article for examples), are inclusive of, and appealing to, young females, so they represent a means of greatly expanding the traditional market base for game consoles. Not simply because there's dancing involved, and 12 year-old girls are more likely to dance than 12-year old boys, which may be true . . . but rather, the direct physical actions involved seem to be part of what lowers a barrier that has always separated boy gamers and their boy toys from a wider public. I think it would be an interesting anthropological study that delved into just WHY that might be and how it might work, but the fact that it's somehow true shows through in Nintendo's thinking about this new device. Look how they mention the emotion of fear twice, and gender twice, in the following quote:

"We want a system that takes advantage of new technology for something that anyone, regardless of age or gender, can pick up and play. [Something with a] gameplay style that people who have never played games can pick up and not be intimidated by. We wanted a controller that somebody's mother will look at and not be afraid of."

What I DON'T like about this set of developments -- dancepad, microphone, eyeToy, Nintendo remote, and other physicalize interface modalities I haven't talked about -- is that they push the boot down even harder on the kinds of cogitative games I actually like: Zork, Myst, SimCity, even Warcraft. At least in the console world. I would like to play those games in my living room, with the benefit of the latest console technology, and a cool controller well-designed for the task, but alas.

Text In Columns

In the Windows-centric milieu, certain developments in computer interfaces are slower to show up. This is not flamebait; it's simply how it seems to work. Expose is an obvious, very useful, example of a real, new UI tool that makes using a computer better. (If you don't know what Expose is, go to apple.com and check out a demo -- it's been around for two or three years now, and occasionally (and poorly) copied for Windows.)

A couple of other interesting developments are afoot in human interfaces that are also, so far, mostly confined to Mac users and web-design nerds. But inroads are being made.

The first of development coming around the corner is the idea of reading text on a screen in multiple columns, instead of in a long, skinny vertical column that requires a lot of scrolling to read. There are a couple of factors that make this reasonable: one is that most screens are wider than they are tall, particularly laptop screens. Columns are easier to navigate without using the mouse -- the right arrow moves you over by one column. It's a nicely quantized operation. And the third thing is context. For example:

The International Herald Tribune website has used a columnar format for some time now; it works fairly well and has garnered some acclaim. A news article is laid out in three columns, side by side. The whole rightmost column of text works as a big button: click on it, and the article scoots over by one column. The next column of text scoots in from the right hand side. By this means, you have plenty of context (the two columns you just read) to anchor the new content (the new column you're about to read). Affordances like this are a major positive aspect of reading a book or newspaper, and completely unavailable in a vertical-scrolling setup.

(I wrote that paragraph from memory. In real life, it turns out that the article doesn't scoot over by one column -- it changes to a fresh set of three columns. So in this case, the context advantage doesn't exist. Oops. Just apply those comments to the following instead.)

I mentioned the keyboard -- the website doesn't actually exploit that. But there is a little piece of text-reading freeware that creates a column layout for any piece of plain or rich text, and it lets you fly through the text very easily using only the arrow keys. Called Tofu, and built on some fairly simple Apple APIs, it's only available for the Mac at the moment. Nor is it the most useful thing in the world, for the simple reason that to use it, you have to drag and drop some text onto the program manually (or write a script). This is a process that is only worthwhile if you have a long piece of easily-selectable text to go through. Something downloaded from Project Gutenberg, or a long web page, are good targets.

But something like Tofu has been suggested as a Firefox plug-in -- which would let you apply column logic to all kinds of random web text. And there is even a new "columnar text" spec afoot in the CSS community, so that web pages may begin to build column-reading functionality into themselves with the addition of a single tag.

The second interesting UI trend is something I'll write about more in the future, because it's going to be so significant and so ubiquitous. Hint: with the Google Desktop search tool installed on your Windows box, press Windows-G. It's a keyboard shortcut that gives pre-indexed, instant access to your entire harddrive, entirely from the keyboard.

Sort of.

Burning Man photos posted to Flickr

I've put up a whole raft of photos of our recent Burning Man trip, over at flickr. I only wish that the slideshows there came in a bigger size. Anyway, the photos themselves are full size, if you want to click in and see all the gory details (i.e. the alkali dust of an ancient lakebed, ground by the millenia into the consistency of chalk dust . . . into my hair).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sandover/

When you mention Burning Man to people, many of them still go blank. Burning What? Well, OK, it's this, and this, and this, and this.  I wrote an article about it here, but jeez, people, Bruce Sterling blew the lid off with a WiReD cover story back in 1996. Hello! Happy Burn.

Sounds Like They Deserve Each Other

Till Derrida do us part

Brown Eyed Girl

Sarah says that one of the songs that absolutely everyone can agree on -- the song that will bring young and old, bridge's side and groom's side, red and blue, onto their feet (or their walker) at any festive occasion -- is "Brown Eyed Girl". You just can't miss with this song, she says. I don't disagree. Some people are sick of it by now, but it's still a pretty good song.

Panties Falling Down

These have been around for a long time, and I know that. But I was leafing through this last night, and among other things, the celery is still hilarious.

The Peculiar Art of Mr. Frahm

The keyboardist in the pedway under block 37

At least, that's what I call him. He's included this collection of beautiful medium-format pictures from Gaper's Block.

The Wall

I made a new website to promote & explain our work on the Wall.

Flickr 101

A nice little article about the basics of Flickr, for my newbs peeps.

Did. . .

. . . you know that there is an edition of War of the Worlds illustrate by Edward Gorey?

http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?usca_p=t&product_id=4556

Mind Mapping

From the “tools you can use” department, a humble suggestion: FreeMind.

You know those “brainstorming” or “productivity” programs that let you map out your ideas as a cloud of labeled circles, connected by lines? I’m suspicious of them, too. They seem to have a learning curve, and it’s never been clear to me just what to do with my idea-cloud, once I’ve drawn it. And they cost money!

But FreeMind -- which is, indeed, one of those programs -- is, first of all, free, which gets us part of the way there. Also, it’s cross-platform, so I can run it on my Mac and my PC both. And it’s so simple, I forgot to get suspicious. You make a new circle with the “Insert” key -- you type in a label for it -- you press “Insert” again to make another circle. You drag your circles around with the mouse. You don’t spend time prettifying, because there’s really not much you can do.

I started toying with FreeMind while I was thinking about a talk I had to give, and I felt like it was time to try a new tool. (This happens to me every once in a while.)

Since there were only about three things I could do -- again: make circles, label them, and move them around -- I had the germ of my talk laid out before I quite knew what I was doing. Largely, this is the direct result of not having many options, software-wise. The program forces you to keep your drawing in a hierarchy (roots, branches, and sub-branches), so the relationships between the various pieces are always clear. I couldn't spend any time prettyifying my mind-cloud; nor could I spend time deliberating how to arrange things. That part was built in.

Once you have a hierarchy made up, the next thing to do is to spit out the drawing in outline form: plain text. (HTML, actually, so you can open it in a web browser.) In my case, I ended up giving my talk straight from that.

FreeMind is lo-fi -- it doesn’t purport to be a “solution” to anything -- but I kind of like it when a tool doesn’t try to take over my life. Other programs can probably do the same things, but they seem to do so much more, and cost so much more, that it’s like using electric hedge clippers when what I wanted was a pair of scissors. There are probably some features of FreeMind I haven’t mentioned here, but don’t bother with them. Don’t even read the help files. Just start a fresh page and press “Insert”.

Northern Exposure Radio

((I wrote the following piece before Apple rolled podcasting into iTunes and blew the whole thing wide open. Still, most of this still holds.))

People love Tivo. Especially people with kids. TiVo lets you watch things over and over (a known kid thing), it lets you be interrupted in the middle and come back (a parent thing), and it entirely frees you from that strange parade known as the “broadcast schedule”. We all love a parade now and then, but not every day.

I don’t watch much TV, and I don’t have TiVo, but I listen to a lot of music and radio. So where’s radio TiVo? For one thing, audio files are so much smaller than video files, so it should be easier, not harder, to have TiVo for radio. Technically speaking, I could have been caching, skipping, choosing, pausing, and rewinding radio for years.

But there's at least one important problem: too many radios. Radio emanates from a cornucopia of fairly inexpensive devices. By comparison, TV is consumed from a big, expensive stationary box that people are willing to invest in. They’ll add expensive, bulky hardware to their expensive, bulky TV if they think it will improve their experience. On the other hand, adding expensive capabilities to a light, nimble, portable item like a radio -- and getting people to pay for it -- is a real trick.

It’s a trick so difficult, apparently, that Apple had to leave out the radio tuner to do it. There is no tuner in iPods. And that’s sort of a shame. I would love to use my iPod clickwheel to scrub back and forth through Morning Edition. I would listen to everything Nina Totenberg said, twice.

Steve Jobs probably declared to himself, one fine day in the early development of the iPod, that radio just wasn’t worth worrying about, and the die was cast. And I suppose he wasn't far wrong. That decision certainly never hurt the iPod. Radio definitely isn’t an exciting medium right now, so people aren’t passionate about access to it.

And radio has poor metadata, which makes storing, indexing, and accessing content much harder to do. TV shows are long things, with good metadata. Radio comes in small, often unlabeled pieces. Weather, traffic, news, songs, call-ins, ads, interviews, features -- all these could occur, some more than once, in the length of one TV show. So on the one hand, it’s hard to create a TiVo-style menu of choices for the radio consumer. And on the other, it's doubtful that users want to make that many choices, moment to moment, about what they want to hear. Decisions points that come once every half and hour, or once an hour -- that's about right. And that's what TiVo supplies.

There are long-form shows on the radio, but a lot of them have already shown up on the web, ready for podcasting into my iPod. And I have plenty of music on my iPod -- more than I can handle, actually. So what’s left that’s unique on the radio? Why tune in?

Well, to name a few possibilities, there are lots of "live" data we might like: sporting events; updates and breaking news; realtime information and offers (come to this new Target tonight, for special deals!); information that quickly goes stale (traffic reports, etc). There are events which involve (or could involve) the listener directly in the content, such as call-in shows; broadcasts from parties and premiers; etc. For those kind of shows, just the feeling that it's live -- that it's happening right now, and I *could* be part of it, even if I'm not -- is part of the value. Cached radio can't duplicate that.

And finally, there is local radio, emanating right now from someone in my community, who is simply reflecting the reality, right now, of the place in which I live. And listening to that sort of content as a recording simply makes no sense. We instinctively respond to and recognize this concept: e.g. the radio stations in "Northern Exposure," "Do the Right Thing," "Pump Up the Volume" or "Gross Pointe Blank." People love that idea, they want that experience, and it's something that neither commercial radio, nor my iPod, can supply.

But I do think it will come. Everything I just mentioned will, I think, emerge more strongly as radio evolves into a live medium, with an identity distinct from recorded media of all kinds.

My Argument for Gmail

I started slowly with a Gmail account last year, only using it as a spam filter account, and then to do a little bit of personal email as a novelty. Then I started having my newspaper sent there, and eventually migrated my travel stuff, receipts, mailing lists. Gmail has now declared victory over my email existence. Much of the time, I use it as my primary interface to my email, INSTEAD OF my own email client software. What's up with that?

In no particular order, here is a list of factors.

==> Labels instead of mailboxes. A subtle difference. Applying a label is just like putting a piece of mail in a folder, with one exception: no mutual exclusion. Putting things in folders makes them go somewhere. . . and stop being some other where. This is not the case with labels. They are not a dead-end. They do not conceal things. They simply mark them.

This didn't sink in immediately. It wasn't until I had about a dozen different labels that I realized that I really could, and might want to, multi-label pieces of mail. I have a "Lists" label for mailing lists. But many emails last year were "Political". Many emails from friends are both "Friends" and "Political" -- they come from a certain person, but they concern a certain domain.

So say I have some piece of email labelled as "Friends" and "Political", and it's also new and unread. If I click on my "Inbox" section, I see the email there, clearly. (That is, it also carries the label "Inbox").

Now if I click on the "Friends" section (which would be like looking inside a folder, under a mutex system), I see every message that has a Friends label, so the same message lives there _as well_. It's listed up top, in bold, because it's unread. But it's also clearly marked as "Inbox, Friends, Political". And so it goes.

Of course, I almost never manually apply labels. I've been building up a set of filters:

==> The filter system. Very nicely done. You create a simple filter (say, mail from "nytimes.com"), and it's extremely easy to instantly preview just which messages in your archive would be grabbed by that filter.

Filters can do sophisticated things, but so far, the only thing I do with them is to apply labels. (Can anyone suggest something else they use them for?)

My hypothetical email where the "from:" line matches a friend, and the "subject:" line includes "rove", matches two different filters, and gets automatically labelled "Friends, Political".

It's so easy to proliferate labels and filters that I expect I'll have have developed a very tailored system in the next six months, without much work on my part.

==> Search, the obvious one. It's fast, consistent, present on every page. It doesn't care about folder hierarchies or other artificial boundaries; all muscle, no fat. A joy to use. I can't say the same for any web mail service, or even for my desktop mail client. Incredible, if you think about it too hard.

==> Message threading or "view by conversation" is the *only* way Gmail lets you look at email.

By enforcing this way of looking at email, they ran a risk. If things get threaded wrong (all the messages with subject line "Hi" getting run together in a single thread), that's an annoying experience for the user. There have been failures with this kind of feature; certainly, using "view by conversation" in Outlook is very annoying, IMNSHO. Gmail seems, however, to have done their threading very intelligently, and gotten a good usability payoff.

Google are saying "This is how you look at your email in Gmail. Take it or leave it." It does one thing and does it well. They were smart, they placed their bet, and they were right.

By comparison, Microsoft likes to say that you can do it this way, and this way, and this way, and you remap every keyboard shortcut if you know how, and you can even embed it as an object inside a spreadsheet, and email it to someone! With a macro. Which might be true, strictly speaking, but in usability terms, in human terms, it's a car crash. None of the 9 ways of skinning the cat it particularly well-implemented, well-documented, pleasurable to use, or efficient. "View by conversation" in Outlook is echt Microsoft. No one uses it.

==> Keyboard shortcuts. A total throwback to the days of pine or elm. And great for that reason! Single-letter shortcuts (like 'j' and 'k') take you back and forth in your inbox, for example. This increases your sense of working with an actual application, rather than a web page. No need to reach for the mouse if you don't want to (and I don't).

Since this application runs in a browser, however, you have to be careful about where the keyboard focus is. Letters could start appearing in the address bar above the page . . . or in the email you're editing . . . rather than being interpreted as commands. The problem is worse in the Safari browser, which seems less fully supported than the Windows options.

There needs to be some solution to this. All web applications that try to hug the keyboard tightly are suffering from the same problem right now.

==> "Archive" instead of trashing turns out to work very well. If you're like me, you like to hang onto emails that might come in handy later, everything from URLs to poems to funny sentences from friends to directions to someone's house. I might want that funny sentence later, to write on a birthday cake.

But under an email foldering system, I have always had to decide (a) when should something exit the Inbox -- thus disappearing from my first layer of attention? (b) is it important enough to keep, or should I delete it? (c) which folder? (don't file it wrong or you won't be able to find it) (d) how good is my folder system these days? (e) do i need to create a folder for this kind of thing? (i.e. directions to people's houses) (f) when should something move from web storage to a hard drive, becoming less available?

These are annoying choices which I never face now. They're just gone! You Archive it. If you need it later, in Wichita, you have it. And when you click Archive, you don't think about "where" to put it. If it's labelled, it will keep living with its labelled counterparts. If it's not labelled at all, it's still available through Search or through the "All Messages" view.

Confidently clicking the Archive button all the time has made my inbox trimmer than it's ever been since 1991 when I started using email. My inbox never grows past a single page anymore.

(I mentioned earlier that "Inbox" is just a label that a message might have -- like any other label. Basically, what clicking the Archive button does is to take the "Inbox" label off a message. The message still retains all its other labels.)

Cribbing for "Trapped in the Closet"

Cliffs Notes on R. Kelly's "Trapped In the Closet"

Lomography Update

I had a chance to play with one of these cameras in LA, and they are truly pretty cool. Eight little pictures, taken in succession, through eight little lenses.

Oktomat camera

It uses ordinary film, but (nota bene) don't get the film developed at Walgreen's.

Sudoku update

www.websudoku.com/

Update: Sudoku puzzles playable on the web, at different levels of hardness, with little features like a timer, an error checker, etc. Though I generally prefer to play on paper, I am feeling a bit pleased with myself because I managed to solve one in under 10 minutes just now. Take that, Kasparov!

Propping up the cost of corn

Open secret: ethanol takes more energy to make than it actually yields. That is, to make a gallon of ethanol requires MORE than a gallon of gasoline.

Study Says Ethanol Not Worth the Energy

The Intonation Music Festival

All my local peeps know about this anyway, but for the record, I am spending $22 to see 2 days worth of indie tunes this weekend at the The Intonation Music Festival.

AC Newman is reviewed and well loved in these pages, and still in heavy rotation in our house, 9 months later; I think Andrew Bird is writing beautiful, casual, intricate songs that Thom Yorke ought to be trying to emulate, and I had dinner near him last week; find the Decembrists awesome at all times (who knew we'd have such an appetite for chimney sweeps, sailors, and wastrels -- and yet it keeps on not abating); and if you, dear reader, have not yet been told to do this, go to emusic.com and try it out, because though as a library it's spotty and lumpy, you can get most of the above very cheaply, but legally, from decent friendly people, with no DRM. Yes, unprotected, un-messed-with mp3 files, the way the internet intended. So fairly priced, you don't even have to give them to your friends for free. You can tell them to buy their own.

PS. I am informed that:
AT ALL COSTS
SEE FOUR TET
absolute glitch science
Our brows were furrowed in stimulations, but we're still not sure of what.


so I will be checking that out as well.

Big Bear Solar Observatory

From the wires. Unsettling & sublime, courtesy of the Big Bear Solar Observatory.

Ames: "Click on "movies" then "gallery." The last two movies are incredible. I can't believe the sun holds together. Physics kick ass."

I know this man

. . . and one of his paintings is hanging in my bedroom.

Abstract Art Work :: By Andrew Ehninger

Now THAT is a robot.

Not kidding this time. 300 rpm

Books by Artists

Sez here that it wasn't until the 20th c. that artists started actually making books. When I'm in L.A. I'll check out The Artist Turns to the Book at the Getty and report back.

.Lomography 3.0

take pictures! with weird russian cameras. or whatever.

"General Igor Petrowitsch Kornitzky, right-hand man to the USSR Minister of Defense and Industry, slammed a little Japanese mini-camera onto the ornate desk of his comrade Michail Panfilowitsch Panfiloff. Mr Panfiloff, Director of the powerful LOMO Russian Arms and Optical factory, examined the camera closely, noting its sharp glass lens, extremely high light sensitivity and robust casing. The two gentlemen, realizing the superior nature and extreme potential of this strange little item, gave immediate orders to copy and improve the design - with the ultimate goal of producing the largest quantity possible for the pleasure and glory of the Soviet population."

Old Money

From the wire: "monochrom is a pretty cool group of concept tech artists who have done all sorts of neat projects, including one where a few of them went into a bank with 50 euro each to exchange into dollars. then they took the dollars, went back in, and exchanged them for euros. they continued the process until all the money was gone, making some sort of statement about something, possibly statements. they're doing more experiences next month, in sf and vancouver, including one where they plan to grow money, in the sense of seeing what kind of weird bacteria they can culture off of smelly old currency."

Experience The Experience Of An Illegal Space Race

Most expensive cities, 2005.

2005 Mercer cost of living rankings

Wonder how they compute these things. Living in Chicago & having friends in Boston, I don't know anyone who considers Chicago the more expensive city. More flat, yes. Stuck in the midst of a bunch of cornfields -- yes. But expensive? No.

P.S. We talked about it at work, and reasoned that they must have computed "expensiveness" in terms of local wages, rather than what you can get for amount of dollars or euros. Thus, Budapest is ranked as more expensive than almost all American cities, despite the fact that the average American income, in dollars, would go VERY far in Budapest.

For the train

Sudoku

A lot more fun than they look like. Seriously!

Context Free Design Grammar

A tiny programming language that generates whimsical, branchy things.

Stabucks Siren

A short history of the siren in the Starbucks logo, who sadly seems to be getting more and more Bowdlerized. They claim that in her newest incarnation she has only one tail??

Philip Greenspun Revisits how to get started in photography -- now with digital

http://philip.greenspun.com/photography/building-a-digital-slr-system

"With the digital SLR you have a good idea of what you're going to capture by looking through the viewfinder. When you press the shutter release the camera captures the image immediately. If you need to zoom or focus manually there are large rings that you can operate quickly by feel. If you see a beautifully-lit scene you can capture that beauty instead of using an on-camera flash to blast everything with harsh white light. If you need to make a specialized photo you can buy or rent a specialized lens and attach it to the camera.

"This article explains the different kinds of digital SLRs available, how to choose the right one for you, and what to do once you get it home from the shop."

Origin of the word cappuccino

I'm posting this because people suspect me of making it up. From answers.com & wikipedia.org:

The history of the word cappuccino exemplifies how words can develop new senses because of resemblances that the original coiners of the terms might not have dreamed possible. The Capuchin order of friars, established after 1525, played an important role in bringing Catholicism back to Reformation Europe. Its Italian name came from the long pointed cowl, or cappuccino, derived from cappuccio, "hood," that was worn as part of the order's habit. The French version of cappuccino was capuchin (now capucin), from which came English Capuchin. The name of this pious order was later used as the name (first recorded in English in 1785) for a type of monkey with a tuft of black cowl-like hair. In Italian cappuccino went on to develop another sense, "espresso coffee mixed or topped with steamed milk or cream," so called because the color of the coffee resembled the color of the habit of a Capuchin friar. The first use of cappuccino in English is recorded in 1948.

Secrets

Send a postcard, tell a secret

Addictive reading.

Nice history of craigslist

"Craig Newmark, its founder, was, and remains, protective of the noncommercial character of the site. In the early years, he ran it in his spare time with the help of other volunteers. Eventually, the traffic overwhelmed them; he quit his day job and imposed fees to pay for full-time stewardship. But he minimized the impact on the community by restricting the new charges to employers in San Francisco who placed job ads. Modest fees for employers in two other cities were added only last year, and only after Mr. Newmark invited Craigslist visitors to comment on the wisdom of the change; there were 3,000 remarks, all posted publicly. Today, 99.2 percent of Craigslist advertisements remain free."

NY Times article

Craigslist traffic is now a FIFTH of eBay's.

Fly With Implanted Webserver

http://www.conceptlab.com

Exciting if you DON'T (please) read the conceptual statments.

Aside: don't tell anyone I said so, but I am suspecting this might be true for most modern art. If artists were meant to write down anything thought-provoking, they would have been writers instead. The materials are cheaper.

Scanner Art

This isn't new, but it's still incredibly beautiful. Art done with flowers, and a black box over a scanner.

http://www.katinkamatson.com/500/water_lily.html

Folding Bikes

I'm looking for one of these used, to take on the train. They used to make a no-frills single-speed model with just a footbrake. Cool.

http://www.dahon.com/folding-bicycles-us-models.htm

Sources Cannot Agree on the True Source of Movieoke

'This battle between corporate America and a self-professed movie junkie may not only determine when you and your friends can publicly act out film scenes, but also which ones you have to pick from. While Movielink's clips stick with mainstream hits, the Den of Sin's East Village crowd prefers artier fare.

'"I had one girl who did interpretive dance to the opening scene of [plotless 1983 documentary] 'Koyaanisqatsi,' kind of just insane," recalls Fite. "The opening scene to 'Full Metal Jacket' is one of my favorites to watch, and just one of the most brilliant scenes to reenact because it's perfect. It's a monologue; it's very abusive."'

http://www.vh1.com/movies/news/articles/1502490/05172005/story.jhtml?_requestid=297773

Shins Music Video. The cow is lip-synching!

"I have some cow fixation, it's hard to deny that," Bizanski said. "But when I first heard the song, portraying such a delicate love story, painting such a rural image, I immediately knew the main character must have four legs. I really had no choice."

Watch the video here.

Read about the production here.

Super-Palimpsest

Another cool thing by Jason Salvalon. Every Playboy centerfold from the 1960's, blended into one frame.

Man-Bags, Third Edition

This is a subject near and dear to my heart. My personal solution is an SLR camera bag, which, while highly credible, is only big enough for a small notebook or a paperback.

Many more ideas here:

http://ganley.org/bags/bags.html

A good source of podcasts

Public radio programs available as podcasts. "In Our Time", a BBC show, is very good. Like what Chicago's own "Odyssey" could be, if it stopped huffing glue.

http://www.publicradiofan.com/podcasts.html

Getting Things Done

So this book, "Getting Things Done", has been around for a few years. It's a businessy get-control-of-your-time kind of book, which of course I have not read.

Del.icio.us-ing around recently, however, I found a site called 43folders, written by a musician, writer, geek, productivity nerd who loves Moleskine notebooks and the Macintosh as much, nay, more, than I do. And he writes vividly about his work in implementing & adapting the methods outlined in "Getting Things Done", starting here.

There's a deeply appealing notion here: that if you don't have a trusted system for writing down and externalizing life-junk -- "open loops", unfinished tasks, demands, projects, guilt trips -- then that junk floats in your head and doesn't let you rest. He calls it "stuff", these floating stressors, these bumblebees.

I have stuff.

The GTD approach says to bind your stuff -- write *everything* down, not in general terms, like "shop for Xmas presents" but in terms of what, specifically, needs to be done next. And then you have to actually use and revisit the system you use. You have to trust it.

Since it's a system, there are system-builders, cultists. For me, though, GTD dovetails nicely with some things I was already starting to do. I'll outline my method here, briefly.

I have two text files, one for work and one for home. Each one is just a list of headings. The headings are things like "People", "Conferences", "Development", and "Maintenance". Under each heading, there is stuff. And I look at this list, a lot. The work file is always open, for example, while I'm at work.

I also reward myself for doing tasks. When I finish a task (and a lot of the tasks are small, like "send email to XXX requesting price list") I copy that line down to a "done" list at the bottom of the text file.

My basic puzzle: I needed multi-platform access to these files, Windows and Mac, often from different places. Can't assume any particular set of software on any machine.

My Solution: For a document format, use text files, rather than anything fancy or proprietary such as Omni Outliner files, wiki pages, etc. For a storage location, get some free WebDAV-able space. I use the free 100MB from spymac.net. On both Win and Mac, I can treat that web storage as a folder, like any other folder on my computer (but slower).

BUT: there are hangups with this method. Would the OS and the apps let me actually *edit* a file that is sitting on a WebDAV folder in this way?

On a PC, the answer is, only through MS Word. You must name the remote file .rtf or .doc, and if you double-click on it, Word will open it automatically. (There is no "Open With..." choice for remote WebDAV files -- there's just Word. Even if you remap so that .doc files open with something like Abiword, clicking a .doc file in the WebDAV folder still boots into Word.)

Sadly, if you suffix a file with .txt, you can't edit it at all thru WebDAV (unless I'm missing something). You'd have to make a local copy, and edit that. Now you have synchronization problem and overhead -- a bad scene.

On a Mac, the answer is simply yes, you can edit over WebDAV, but saving and opening are both slow.

My wish list:

I'd like to leave these files in .rtf, rather than .doc. But because of Tofu, I've realized how great columns are. I'd like to edit an .rtf file in columns. But Tofu doesn't let you edit -- it just lets you look. So for now, I'm using .doc files, with three columns. This means having Word open all the time, which I'm less than thrilled to do.

.rtf doesn't actually include column formatting information, and I don't want it to. I just like to edit this way, because it lets me put everything onscreen in one view. Currently, my lists are 20 or 24 column inches long. Without columns, I have to scroll up and down all the time. I know that on the PC I'm stuck with MS Word for the time being, but on the Mac, a Tofu-style editor would be a great tool -- *much* more useful than Tofu-the-viewer.

Zoomquilt

zoomquilt: a piece of software that makes you remember the first time you saw an Escher drawing.

Triptych

Art project: 64 episodes of late-night television, overlaid. Mesmerizing (except for Leno, who is boring even this way.)

http://www.salavon.com/LateNite/LateNight.shtml

Kolam patterns

A Kolam is a sort of painted prayer -- a line drawing composed of curved loops, drawn around a grid pattern of dots. They are generally symmetric.

Every morning in rural southern India, millions of women draw kolams on the ground with white limestone powder or flour. Through the day, the drawings get walked on, rained out, or blown around in the wind; new ones are made the next day.

When people get married, the ritual kolam patterns created for the occasion can stretch all the way down the street. Patterns are often passed on generation to generation, mother to daughter.

http://www.i-kolam.com/

The part about the monkey

Comic Book Covers

The Unitarian Jihad!

"Beware! Unless you people shut up and begin acting like grown-ups with brains enough to understand the difference between political belief and personal faith, the Unitarian Jihad will begin a series of terrorist-like actions. We will take over television studios, kidnap so-called commentators and broadcast calm, well-reasoned discussions of the issues of the day. We will not try for "balance" by hiring fruitcakes; we will try for balance by hiring non-ideologues who have carefully thought through the issues.

"We are Unitarian Jihad. We will appear in public places and require people to shake hands with each other. (Sister Hand Grenade of Love suggested that we institute a terror regime of mandatory hugging, but her motion was not formally introduced because of lack of a quorum.) We will require all lobbyists, spokesmen and campaign managers to dress like trout in public. Televangelists will be forced to take jobs as Xerox repair specialists. Demagogues of all stripes will be required to read Proust out loud in prisons."

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: The Shotgun of Forgiveness.

Get yours.

SeeSaw

I like the photos that are shot from above -- maybe from a ladder? The kids are arranged on the ground, laying down, in tableaux that make them look like they're in midair.



See Saw Magazine

Using the world as a palette

Camera inside brush -- if you can see it, you can paint with it. I like!

http://web.media.mit.edu/%7Ekimiko/iobrush/

I haven't been keeping up . . .

. . . or I just haven't tapped in. Humanities academia is out there blogging, and with its boots on.

Michael Berube

Burning Man 2005: Black Rock City is in Google Maps

Satellite
Photo

What Would "Electro The Moto-man" Think?

Over at the Institute for Applied Autonomy,
they've mounted graffiti-writing robots on
remote-controlled cars:

http://www.appliedautonomy.com/gw.html

Greenspun

Phillip Greenspun is a clever polymath -- he's at MIT, but I only knew his name because I read a whole bunch of practical material about photography that he's put on the web. As far as I've seen, it's some of the best photography how-to you can find, for free. But it turns out he has other irons in the fire as well. Here are some handy things:

Software Engineering for Internet Applications
http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/

"Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing".
(Not screamingly up to date -- nothing about blogs -- but interesting to skim for that reason.)

Total Eclipse of the Heart

http://www.hugi.is/hahradi/bigboxes.php?box_id=51208&f_id=1269

Sarah's comment was, "This is so Triplets of
Belleville."

My comment would be, "This is so Polish young
men wearing insane pants playing an 80's power
ballad on kitchen appliances."

A film made to promote the Marshall Plan

"The Extraordinary Adventure of a Quart of Milk"

France, 1951, 14 min
Director: Alain Pol

Recalling the Gates

Christo and Jean-Claude's The Gates

During the 16 chilly February days that Christo and Jean-Claude's caution-orange Gates (can we please stop calling them saffron?) straddled Central Park's walkways, much was written about how the fleeting, ephemeral nature of the installation emphasized the power of collective experience and memory. A brand new project launched today by the Institute for the Future of the Book and Flickr.com explores those qualities further by inviting the four million or so people who came to stare at the Gates to share their photographs and stories about the massive public art project. The aim of these two digital archivist organizations is to build what they're calling a "collective memory machine" that will offer the masses access to the ways the Gates impacted individuals. Everyone who experienced the Gates is encouraged to share their memories through words and pictures. For additional information on the project, and to submit your work, visit www.gatesmemory.com

Picasa 2's "Timeline" feature

As a sometimes interface designer, I am perplexed by the timeline tool.

The timeline is a series of "piles" of photos -- but how did they get that way? Does each pile correspond to one folder on my drive? One date? How many things are in the pile? How "big" is the pile? They're somewhat inscrutable objects, because they give me no information whatsoever.

There's no way for me to look inside the piles themselves and review the pictures there, in-place, synchronously. When I double-click one, I have to watch . . . a slideshow. (How often could that be the desirable behavior? When I open my email inbox, would I want a slideshow of my emails?)

Behind the timeline, there is a desaturated picture, presumably a sort of representative of an "era" in my picture library timeline. Is there a representative for each pile? Not exactly; it seems hard to predict when that picture will actually change. How is the representative picture chosen? Don't know. It seems like there could easy be more than one -- how about four, tiled together? There could also be a few sample words -- important-seeming people and place names taken from my photo's file names or folder names, for example, helping me to get some context for the era of photos that I'm looking at. Or just some filenames.

I'm thrilled that Google is letting fun, creative interface design work see the light of day in a major product like Picasa, but I must say that this particular widget needed a little more Google-style attention to detail.

Stewardess Uniforms. Creepy. Glamorous. From a Dutchman.

http://www.uniformfreak.com

Don't miss the "uniforms' button. Mohawk Airlines?

Office in a Bucket!

Inflatable shelters, for some reason.

www.inflate.co.uk

Our Wall in PC Magazine, pg 20

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1770206,00.asp


As an added bonus, this is the first time I've published a photograph in a national magazine. I'm not credited, and Kelly (pictured) is actually a MAN, but never mind.

Thinking about what they're calling the "Insight Economy"

Here's one definition of what technologists are calling Insight, which is a kind of ill-defined computer-assisted knowledge.

Insight may be reducible to knowledge as such. If it can be held in your head, it's knowledge, certainly. It may be actionable, too, and that's always nice.

But our fumblings around the word insight might also be our unconscious attempt to name a new and unusual _property_ of some knowledge. It has to do with the path that knowledge took from measurement to data to information to knowledge.

The information systems we've worked up over the last 150 years help us to gather information about events and states we don't, and can't, directly witness, because of things like
(a) distance -- I'm not near my shipping containers, and I can only be in one place
(b) time -- there are so many shipping containers, and I have finite time
(c) scale -- many events that are important are too small or large, or too slow or too fast, for me to observe
(d) political and other barriers

Our knowledge paths overcome these and other barriers, to reach out into reality and gather data points that serve us.

But much of the knowledge we've gathered has been of the _same_kind_ or of the _same_order_ as we would gather if we were there ourselves, doing it ourselves, climbing the knowledge-making ladder alone. The questions we ask of our systems are bite-size -- what is the stock level? What is the temperature? What is the flow? Where are the people? What is the record of events? What is the news? What is new? Sometimes we get a large answer; then we set about breaking it down into consumable pieces.

As we ask those bite-size questions of our systems and our world, we intuitively shape them to our own ability to process the answers we expect to get back. This, I think, crucially limits our information gathering -- and that limits our knowledge.

I might ask three people, "What happened at the fight you saw?" -- or look at three different videocamera feeds of the fight. But if I were at Gettysburg just after it happened, would I ask 250,000 soldiers, "What happened in the battle?" The question would be almost meaningless, because just listening to the answers would take half of my lifetime. (Similarly, it's hard to prosecute someone like Saddam Hussein because it's very hard to ask and answer the question "What happened in Iraq over the last 15 years?" -- even though almost everyone, by definition, was there!) We don't normally relate to knowledge in that godlike way, because we have good, non-godlike intuitions about what kind of knowledge-gathering is reasonable and necessary for our primate lives.

But now, with computing tools, some of those intuitions will need to be unlearned. I think there are probably a lot of What-happened-at-Gettysburg kind of questions that we are starting to be ready to ask.
We might define insight -- or some incipient knowledge-form, call it George -- as a 3-step process:
1. gathering knowledge far beyond human scale, without explicit human direction of what we are looking for (sensors at the battle, at all scales)
2. processing it without human prompting, but according to human priorities (working on the question "What happened at the battle?", at all scales)
3. distilling it to human scale, for human use (presenting various, consumable, versions of what happened. Humans sometimes are interested in: patterns, anomalies, correspondences, contradictions, singularties, lulls, etc. )

----------------------

One quick example of a system where new information capabilities are put to awkward use because of the limitation of human knowledge-making: security guards watching a bank of camera feeds.

10 years from now, say we connect those camera feeds to a "smart" monitoring system instead. The useful knowledge output of the system might be the same as that of the security-guard room: some superior authority is advised to come have a look. But the knowledge that led to that alert was never held in a human mind, and in fact, no single mind might be able to hold all the variables that our imaginary "smart" algorithm considered as it worked. No human might know what the algorithm "watched for". No human might understand what, exactly, the learning algorithm actually learned when it trained. (A real human mind might hold a completely different set of variables, have different training, and work along a different path, even as it came to similar conclusions.)

Even if you don't like my examples, perhaps you can see what I'm trying to describe anyway. Just as we send robots into terrains we can't physically withstand, we send knowledge-creation algorithms into territories we can't cogitate -- at least, not at scale -- and maybe we can't even tell them in advance what to look for.

I'm _not_ talking about spreadsheets, or the fact that computers can hold more bits than I can, or add numbers faster; I'm talking about the fact that today's machines enable a new class of knowledge creation processes which aren't intuitive because they violate our intuitions about knowledge-gathering. We need tools that will help people harness (if not understand) this new sort of knowledge-creation.

(I think simulation is another good example of a system that works to produce this new, hard-to-think-about kind of knowledge. We have all considered the question of whether, when you have simulated a real system, you have some understanding of that real system. Well, under the schema I'm setting out, we would happily say, "No, not at all, but that doesn't stop you from doing the things you want to do -- in fact, your limited understanding defines the tool's purpose.")

What's Cooking at the Patent Office This Week: Tacos

Freshpatents.com


Spa audio system
A portable spa including an audio system designed to use the spa shell as the sound generating device. Transducer devices are bonded to the spa shell so as to couple the sound vibration energy to the shell. ...

Dog leash for use on bicycle
A compound leash adapted for use with a bicycle for holding a dog in check as a person simultaneously rides the bicycle and runs the animal. Made by a dog lover and bicycle rider so that he can take his dog for a safe and delightful experience.

Clip-on taco holder
This invention is a holder for up to three (3) or more tacos which clips onto the edge of most any typical dinner or serving plate. This holder for taco shells is designed to hold the tacos in an upright position for filling the taco ingredients, and keeping them upright to avoid the taco ingredients from spilling out as well as giving outside support with filling the taco, thereby helping to avoid breaking the taco shell.

Yes, the Fish Really Did Swim Upstream

Someone was asking me if it was true, the thing about the fish, and the guy who was peeing in the river? It is. Thank you, Cecil Adams. Thank you!

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/010907.html

Totem & Taboo

This is the best response I've seen so far to the Lawrence Summers spectacolo.

Steven Pinker in the New Republic

Google does it again: now the best mapping tool

http://maps.google.com

The pop-up balloons are highly useful -- they present the right amount of contextual information. And they disappear when you click on the map surface.

The live scrolling is excellent. You can just pan around. A shocking thing to be doing in a web browser interface.

If they could make zooming more continuous, more like the scrolling, that would also be excellent.

Strange search results sometimes. I searched for "London, England" and "United Kingdom", and was directed to various spots in Kansas and Oklahoma which didn't seem to match at all.

Searching for (e.g.) Ainslie St., Chicago, IL, should ideally turn up the notion of a street or path -- not a string of a dozen addresses randomly spread along that street.

Asking for directions does turn up a nice path, though it could be more annotated with route information, milestones, signposts, etc.

Rolling around the countryside

Zorbathon

State of the Union Visualizer

I like visualizations that make things clearer by shrinking them.

Pick a word here -- terrorism, freedom, kill, etc. -- and see how they light up in the last few years' State of the Union addresses.


style.org > State of the Union Parsing Tool

NAO Design

I have never seen anything quite like this. They make lamps, an armored car, a backpack-based projectile cannon, and stilts made from redwood, aluminum, neoprene, and coyote fur.

NAO Design

"Wuthering Heights"

A Danish metal band that TJ found. They have a song called "Bad Hobbits Die Hard".

-----------------------

Hey, did you guys know that there is a Danish metal band called "Wuthering Heights?" I'm listening to them now. They totally kick ass. Thank you, internet!

http://www.darkelucidation.com/wuthering_heights_discography.php

--T

Tiny Pineapple

http://www.tinypineapple.com

I don't know what these things are, but they have descriptions like "Who knew opera singers could be so endearing?" and "Who wants to share a milkshake and maybe more?"

Marathon!

An excellent Macintosh game from the mid-90's, Marathon, is now free!

http://trilogyrelease.bungie.org