Android market eternal purchase history

There is no way to permanently remove or hide apps on the Android market, even if you don't want them any more and they were free. The system remembers that you "bought" them, even if you didn't have to pay, and you can get them again for no charge. Great for paid apps, but not so great for free rubbish you didn't like, or for apps that are not compatible with an upgraded/replaced device. My own history even includes one that is now obsolete, replaced by a paid version. Anything you ever installed on an Android device, even for a minute and even after you uninstalled it, will get the same prominence as something you use every day, at least as far as the market is concerned. There should be a way to make it forget.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Your purchase history doesn't need to be your app install history.
PPS - Especially for free apps.

Friday Flash Fiction - Positive

"Blow into the tube please."

Officer Matthews waited while the driver blew through the plastic tube on his hand-held machine and checked the reading when it made a beep. Positive.

"Sir, you've tested positive for cheesecake."

"... Excuse me?"

"Sir," the officer repeated, "My machine has detected that, at some stage in the past four hours, you have eaten at least one, probably two slices of cheesecake. I'll need you to step out of the vehicle."

"But ... is cheesecake illegal now?"

Officer Matthews sighed. "Of course it's illegal. Do you think we would go to all this trouble to pull people over near midnight and test them with our very expensive cheesecake detectors if there was nothing wrong with a bit of cheesecake now and then?"

"When did this happen? I never heard about it."

"Ignorance is no excuse. I'll need you to step out of the vehicle, sir."

The driver looked panicked, eyes darting left and right, knuckles white on the steering wheel. Matthews could tell he was going to try something stupid. He signalled to his partners nearby.

"Take your hands off the steering wheel and step out of the vehicle. I won't ask again."

His breathing gets shallow and quick, he looks left and right, well into fight-or-flight mode. Officer Matthews steps back, on alert, but lets events take their course. Tyres squeal, choking white smoke rises up, then the car lurches forward and stops dead on the chocks the other officers have placed in front of the wheels. The man in the car slumps down and finally opens the door, then rests his head in his hands.

"It ... it was just dessert."

"That's what they all say."

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Just a silly thought that occurred to me on a drive home one night.
PPS - I'm personally glad the cheesecake police don't exist.

Local business reputations

Businesses are going to get smaller and more local in the future, if they don't get globally huge. We will find it harder to know who is reliable and who isn't, and we won't necessarily know who does what best. Who is going to help us navigate that landscape? It won't be enough to just find local businesses, because you won't know their reputation, and a simple rating or review system isn't much better because you can't necessarily trust the ratings and reviews.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We need a reputation system we can rely on to evaluate strangers.
PPS - I don't think such a thing will actually happen.

Fading taste when aging

I've heard that as you age, your sense of taste begins to fade along with your other senses, so that's why older people tend to eat bland foods. But if you were always one to appreciate food, wouldn't it change your preferences to very strong flavours and interesting textures rather than identical blandness? If I couldn't taste my food as well as before, I would certainly want a variety of textures, and I would want someone to herb-and-spice that thing to the ends of the earth to wake up my lazy taste buds.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also, I'd need someone to read out the menu in a loud voice.
PPS - Or get me a large-print version.

Shrinking Hollywood

If there is less money to be made from big budget movies in the future, then Hollywood will just shrink and make fewer movies. That might sound like a good thing, because you expect them to stop making the same exact stories over and over, but it's going to be the exact opposite at first. The few movies made won't be high quality and innovative. They will be proven formulas that present low risks, which means more explosions, more formulaic romantic comedies and lots more remakes and sequels.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The sad part is that we voted for that, with our dollars.
PPS - And they will probably continue to make some money.

New file system requirements

A modern file system for the networked world would need ways of addressing data across the whole network and indicating backups, duplicates, old versions and arbitrary metadata too, like face tags for photos, the authors of a document, things like that. It should also, preferably, have a way of indicating that a certain file is a member of some kind of "bundle" that should come along with it, because zipping files just to keep them together is a bit silly. Not essential, but nice to have, if it's not too confusing.

The next question is what do we do with such a file system? Just keep all our personal files accessible everywhere, or something more substantial?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm sure we'll think of something.
PPS - As sure as I am that I haven't thought of it yet.

Paying artists for downloads

The internet has outpaced copyright. Rather than suing everyone into oblivion for their downloads of movies, music, TV and software, what if we tracked what people were downloading and charged them a flat licensing fee to be distributed to artists for each download? To recognise the downloads and match them to the rights holders, however, you'd need to make sure they matched an official version, which is very tricky. But assuming that could be done, and the license fee was charged to everyone at the same rate as part of their internet service, it might work.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Unfortunately, it might mean less money for artists.
PPS - Also, this amounts to a micropayment system, and those all have pretty big flaws.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Stranger with the Pygmy Elephant

It was a summer afternoon when the stranger in red and gold rode into our village on his pygmy elephant. He stood in front of us and unrolled a piece of paper that told him what to say, so he must have been very stupid. He said he had come to collect taxes for our king, which was strange, because the king lives two huts away from me, and he was standing on the other side of the stranger. He looked just as confused as the rest of us.

When we told him the king was just over there, he said no, that is not the real king. The real king, he said, lives far away, and is in charge of all of these lands, from one ocean to the other. Our village belongs to this faraway king, he said, and we must pay him taxes. None of us knew what an "ocean" was, but that didn't seem to matter to the stranger. He stood up as tall as he could and pointed at the ground saying you will pay your taxes right now.

No other strangers in red and gold have come after this little man, and it has been a very long time. A few people say it is because the faraway king was not real. Some others say it is because we sent his pygmy elephant away. Personally, I think it is because we tied the little man's bones to the saddle he used for his elephant when we sent it away, and the faraway king decided one little village was too much trouble if they were just going to eat his servants.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Politics feels like that to me, sometimes. Remote and weird, but without the cannibalism.
PPS - I do pay my taxes, though.

Quickflix pay-per-view

Quickflix have just introduced a pay-per-view service along with their unlimited streaming and disc-by-mail services. What they have not yet done is add a button on the queue page that allows me to see at a glance whether anything upcoming in my queue is available to stream right now. I could click through 120 movies and see which ones might be available for streaming, and if I get especially desperate for anything to watch one day I might do so, but right now it seems like this service was designed as a totally separate product, not with the customer in mind.

For me, renting a movie from Quickflix is much the same transaction, whether it comes in the mail as a disc, or streamed to my PC (and the two streamed options are also kept separate, because of their different billing structures). So what I need is to have the option of grabbing something from my disc queue and watching it via streaming right now, then having it automatically removed from the disc queue. Get that? I'm here to watch movies, and the format they take is a secondary detail. By looking at the Quickflix website, you would assume renting one pay-per-view movie is a totally different mental mode as getting a disc in the mail and watching it later. It's not.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Perhaps some people feel differently.
PPS - The Quickflix billing department, for example.

Open source is not on app stores

Closed platforms, by which I mean any hardware, software or combination, that charge developers to list their apps for download, will naturally stifle open-source software and hobbyists. For a project run by a worldwide community of like-minded volunteer geeks, nobody in particular would be responsible for putting up the cash to list their project on the market or app store, so it won't go there. Some very large projects might be willing and able to jump through the hoops and pay their dues, but that's not what the app store model is set up to do. And when you are set up only to accommodate one particular type of innovation, you've already lost.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then again, I do have positive things to say about app stores.
PPS - I'll save that for another time.

Elderly knowledge work

Our elderly citizens, who can no longer do physical work, should be employed in the knowledge work industry. Their minds should be put to use in search, analysis and synthesis, and we can do so with relatively little infrastructure investment. They know how to read and write already, and they know what their interests are. At the very least, they should be blogging articles about their areas of expertise, but some of them might find that they are adept at protein folding or participating in some other large-scale pattern recognition and processing problem. We don't need them to work quickly, we just need to empower them to work on these problems if they would like to.

Personally, I would like to spend my formal retirement investigating the many areas of human knowledge to which I did not apply myself during my employment, and perhaps discovering a new one at which I am adept. I don't want to spend my whole retirement playing Scrabble and waiting for death. I want to learn and help solve humanity's big problems, one drop in the ocean at a time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I may feel different later in life.
PPS - In fact, I'd basically count on it.

Physical retail in an online world

Retail of the future is going online, which makes perfect sense. Lower costs, greater reach, lower risk, what's not to like? But not every shopping experience belongs there. Clothes, for instance, when you want to try them on first. Convenience shopping, where you need something right now, and can't wait for postage. Fast food. Bricks and mortar retail of the future has to take one of the following paths: customisation, impulsiveness or convenience.

Customisation can still happen online, but for the case of clothes, it is easier to get someone's measurements if they are physically present, and then the automatic tailoring machine can produce your garments or shoes on the spot, perfectly fitted. Full personalisation and immediate results ensure a niche for that market. Impulsiveness I explained above - basically tricking you into a purchase you wouldn't otherwise have made, except that it was right there and so cheap. Then there's convenience, where, as before, delivery after ordering is too slow, such as for fast food.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There will still be physical retail in the future.
PPS - But the shape of it is going to change.

New story formats

The lines are blurring between books, movies and games, but what links them all is storytelling. To what genre can we assign an interactive iPad app involving text, animation and touch? It is as much a book as a movie and game, but it is none of these. Perhaps we should just call it a story.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also, is this what stories will need to become to hold our attention?
PPS - Yeah, that's probably true.

Friday Flash Fiction - End of the Line

"It's been six weeks, Belinda! Six weeks today. There's no rescue coming! We have to get out of here!" Carlos was as hysterical as usual.

Belinda replied, "Really, Carlos? Again with this? We have food, water and shelter to last us as long as we need, plus we sent out a search party three weeks ago. There's been nothing from them - not even a signal fire over the horizon. We might not know what's out there beyond the train line, but we can assume they didn't find anything good!"

"I'd rather die trying to get home than waiting here for some imaginary rescue party."

Carlos' words hung in the still, cold night air as we sat gathered around our nightly campfire. The problem was that they were both clearly right. We could survive here, stuck in the desert with the last car of a long-gone train, but we could never really live.

"Then you might as well go, hadn't you? There's no reason to sit here and complain at the rest of us. Take what you need and get out, if that's what you really want. Nobody's stopping you." said Belinda, with less energy than she usually mustered for a Carlos rant.

Carlos sat staring at the fire for a while longer, then, without a word, took his battered briefcase, a few strips of dried rabbit meat and a bottle for water and stalked off into the dark night, dusty grey suit, worn leather shoes and all. The silence lasted a long time, and we were all surprised at what Belinda said when she broke it.

"He's right, you know. We all know. The trains should have been running at least once a day along this line, and even if they had to stop for some reason, they should have started again. Maybe we can ... maybe we can make it back if we follow the tracks."

Someone further back piped up, "That's what the search party did."

"Then what are we supposed to do? Sit here and wish really hard for a rescue? Mike and Alice didn't have strength in numbers like we do. If we go now, we can keep up with Carlos, and maybe all of us will survive instead of just us ... or just him."

Nobody called for a vote. Hands went in the air, heads nodded agreement, so we all picked up what we could carry and hurried off down the train line, the way Carlos had gone.

Owning YouTube

A short while ago - just before Christmas - I started using Instapaper to save long articles to read later, offline. It was so useful and so easy that I immediately went looking for the video equivalent, and found PwnYouTube. Now, a few months later, I can hardly imagine my life without it, because I frequently come across videos I can't watch right now (because I'm at work, or they're too long) but I have plenty of time to watch on the train ride. The problem, mostly, is that when I have the time, I don't have the video and vice versa. With PwnYouTube, I can download online video, copy it to my phone and watch it later. It's perfect, so I expect sooner or later it will be destroyed by copyright claims or other legal difficulties. Obviously, giving me the ability to watch more videos I would previously have skipped completely is a terrible business model for YouTube.

YouTube do have their own "Watch Later" service, but you have to be online with a YouTube account for it to work. The appeal of downloading the videos, to me, is the ability to watch them offline later. Until the official service provides that capability (perhaps via a phone app) then I won't bother, because what I have already works much better than that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I doubt YouTube will ever offer an offline view later service.
PPS - But if they want to display ads and compete with this third party service, it's the best way.

Flawless airline records

How to maintain a flawless record as an airline without being perfect:

1. Sell tickets through Airline A.
2. Wait until plane is boarded and ready for takeoff.
3. Sell entire flight, including plane, to Airline B, also owned by you.
4. Wait for safe landing.
5. Sell entire flight back to Airline A.

If there is a crash at step 4, just skip step 5. Now the only crashes occur on Airline B's watch, and Airline A is, technically, faultless. Granted, Airline A has also never been responsible for a successful flight while it was happening, but as long as you can gloss over that fact, you win.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And you can always create Airline C to replace Airline B when its reputation falters.
PPS - I wonder whether all this is more effort than simply being a good airline.

Dopamine and serotonin

I have a kind of theory of humours for psychology which is just barely based on bits and pieces of science I've picked up over the years. Basically, it classifies people into dopamine- or serotonin-dominated people. Dopamine people are like extroverts, excited by new experiences and meeting new people. Serotonin people are more introverted, and likely to respond to new experiences with fear, thus taking fewer risks. I know psychology is way more complicated than that, and nobody is 100% either way, but we all like ways of classifying the people we meet, and this is one of those ways.

People who are problem gamblers apparently view a near-win as if it were a win, and get the same high from that as they do from an actual win. Some other people, apparently with non-addictive personalities, view the near-win as a loss, and get their reward moment from stopping. I wonder whether this has anything to do directly with brain chemistry. Addiction is tricky, of course, but if your brain has two potential responses to a stimulus, such as flooding with dopamine or serotonin, then those of us with serotonin responses are going to get a negative reinforcement.

I also wonder whether dopamine and serotonin people wake up differently. I think of myself as serotonin-dominated, and I wake up quickly, while Debbie is in the dopamine camp, and she wakes up very slowly. Of course, two data points don't make much of a pattern.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I should probably read about serotonin syndrome.
PPS - Or I could just keep speculating wildly without any training, which is more fun.

Sermons podcast in advance

Instead of coming to church to hear a sermon, we could have the sermon delivered via podcast during the week, and listen to it as many times as we like, going over tricky bits and giving it some thought. Then we could come to church on Sunday to discuss the issues with the pastor there to provide the theological insight we need, or to clarify the points we weren't clear on. I wonder whether that would be more satisfying for everyone, and more in tune with today's digital, participation culture. It's the same model that Khan Academy has been using in schools, with some success. What do you think? If you already go to church, would this make it any better or maybe worse? If you don't go to church, would this make it more appealing?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There would always be people dominating the discussion, though.
PPS - And not everyone would have the time during the week to listen to sermons in advance.

Email program options

Most of the time, I don't bother setting some Outlook options, because I can't find them. Next time you get a chance, try to count the Outlook configuration windows and map the buttons required to navigate between them. Why is this window design so complicated? Sometimes you can be three or four sub-windows deep to change some settings.

At the other end of the spectrum, and just as bad, is Thunderbird's advanced options editor. A big long list of key/value pairs that is searchable, but offers no real guidance on what the settings mean or which ones are related to which others (besides their names). There must be a middle ground somewhere that is more usable than Outlook but less daunting than Thunderbird.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I do think, in general, that Thunderbird's standard options window is better than Outlook's.
PPS - But then it has "Account Settings" and "Options" as separate menu commands with separate dialogue windows, too.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Band by the Road

The band played inconspicuously by the roadside, just another drummer, electric bass and a keyboard, and most people hardly noticed. They hurried about their lives, not taking the time to listen, at least consciously, to the music. But gradually, as they played on, the footsteps of passers-by would begin to sync up with the beat. An occasional stranger would slow down, intrigued by the music that seemed to grip his soul, force him to look. And the band played on.

They gathered an audience whose feet unconsciously shuffled to and fro, matching the rhythm of the snare and bass. Their fingers wiggled in time with the melody of the keyboard, and a warm feeling welled up within them so that they turned their faces upwards, as if basking in the sunlight. All smiles, the crowd grew larger, gathered closer.

When people started to fall over, the others were too taken over by the music to notice their neighbours dropping off beside them. Each new one who approached was similarly taken in, similarly incapacitated. And now the band stopped playing and began to pick among the unconscious bodies of their audience for wallets, phones, watches and rings, any small trinkets and valuables they could find. Their practiced fingers lifted gold earrings, silver necklaces and opal cufflinks with ease. Long before the crowd began to stir, the band was gone, taking with them a bounty of private valuables and the secret of their strange music.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I am at Easterfest this weekend.
PPS - Hopefully none of the bands are these kind of musical magical pickpockets.

One-hit wonders

When the world caters to single hits, you don't need to aim for a career as an artist. You can sing one song, write one book, make one movie and leave it at that if that's all you have in you. There may be fans who clamour for more, but for the most part the world will move on and leave you alone. That's one advantage of society's shrinking attention span.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And if it turns out you do have a second work in you, that's okay too.
PPS - You can keep going as long as you like, and stop before your quality drops.

Maze blackouts

I had a feeling you could kind of run a maze by drawing (or imagining) a dividing line between the two end points, then blocking out any dead ends nearby, and using the unblocked areas as a guide. From there, you just repeat the process until the way becomes clear, like a path of light among the shadows. So I gave it a try on a page from my "Office Time Wasters" desk calendar that has occasional mazes in it.

It turns out this is a much slower way of running simple mazes, and that fact, ironically, makes them more fun for me, because they last longer than just finding the path the traditional way. Also, it turns out not to handle loops at all, since they are areas with no dead ends. They amount to alternate paths to the goal, but longer ones that aren't worth it. Still, I plan to do all the mazes in my desktop calendar this way from now on.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In the example picture, I've blacked out the loops, too.
PPS - Just because it looked neater.

If This Then That

It's been observed that most people coming into programming think in terms of "when [event] do [action]" patterns. That's probably why www.ifttt.com (which stands for "If This Then That") is so intuitive. It lets you set up self-processing rules in exactly that manner, connecting to a set of third-party services such as email, RSS, Dropbox, Twitter and so on. I wonder if you could design a good programming language around those principles.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You'd have to include more than simple actions, though.
PPS - Otherwise some programs would not be possible.

Anyone can be scammed

If the timing and circumstances are right, anyone can be caught out by a scam. You can fool all of the people some of the time, which means we are all potential victims, though that doesn't mean you will necessarily be caught by a scam one day. It just means that nobody is so special that they are immune to it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I have been fooled once or twice.
PPS - Though the definition of "scam" is probably stretched in those cases.

There's no reason to use Google+ yet

There is not yet a compelling reason to use Google+, and as long as Facebook has the critical mass, that is unlikely to change. It's "Like Facebook, but without all the people". What good is that? The people are why I'm on Facebook at all. Until they start on Google+, I have no reason to leave, and neither do they. If Google wants people to move to their platform instead of the current establishment, we require compatibility more than equivalence. That's tricky to write into software, but did you think changing the world would be easy? Rather than "if you build it, they will come", you get "if you build it second, they will ask Why Should We Change?".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's a valid question.
PPS - And the answer is never implied.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Listeners

Today is a big day for me at Westbridge Magical Academy. I am presenting my doctorate thesis to the Mage's Council, one on which I have worked for the past six years, and they are not going to like it.

I take a fortifying breath before pushing open the door to the large Council Hall. It is empty except for their stately oak desk at one end, engraved with all manner of magical symbols. The Mages watch me with slightly disdainful looks as I approach the long distance across the echoing wooden floor, passing in and out of the sunbeams streaming in the windows. I stop abruptly and my robes sweep forward, kicking up a little dust. It would be usual to conjure up the title of my thesis, "The Language of Magic" to float in the air beside me, and to make full parchment copies also appear on the Council desk, before each long-bearded member. I have delivered handwritten copies to each member of the Council in advance, and I do not conjure my title at all.

"Proceed" says Head Mage Arcturum when it appears I will not be conjuring anything. I nod slightly and clear my throat.

"We have long known magic to be bound to language. Incantations, whether spoken or written, appear to be essential, and the symbols and signs we use are also language, though in pictographic form. That realisation of the centrality of language to the magical arts, and the observation that incantations and symbols are both forms of language, led me to explore in detail the different forms of language that may be used to invoke certain well-known spells and effects, particularly basic levitation, production of fire, illusion and far-sight.

"My research and experiments eventually proved that all of these basic elements of magic are reproducible in almost any language known to man, spoken or written, including the isolated natives of many small island nations, but also sign languages, dead languages, and even music and mathematics. I also demonstrated that a known incantation in a language unknown to the speaker, failed to produce the same results as the same incantation in his or her native language.

"This last anomaly led me down an unexpected and puzzling path. Why should a wizard need to know the language of an incantation before it produces the desired result, and why do incantations translated to new languages still produce those results?"

I had their attention now.

"We know that three things are required for language: a message, a shared code, and two or more entities. Mages, we wizards are not the most powerful beings on this planet. You yourselves are not even the most powerful beings in this very room, nor am I. Someone, something has been listening to our incantations, learning our languages, and doing our bidding at their whim for centuries. They are here. They are all around us, and we do not know what they want. Until we do, I cannot, in good conscience, perform any magic, though I intend to continue my research. Thankyou."

I wait for the stunned outrage, the nervous whispers, the quick flicking of pages to check the details of my research, or even just a dismissive smile and handwave. I get none of these. They stare at me, deadly serious.

Arcturum speaks slowly to break the silence. "You were, I take it, under the impression that this was unknown to the Mage's Council?"
My jaw works up and down a few times, apparently unwilling to form any words. "I ... yes, sir."

"We are," he continues, "well aware of such entities, though, as you say, unaware of their ultimate motives. You will be assigned to work under Doctor Millinum as he attempts to unravel the entities' intentions. Doctorate granted."

He taps his wand on the desk with the sound of a gavel that echoes through the big empty room, and the Council files out silently, leaving me alone. That ... did not go as planned, but in hindsight, it probably could not have gone any better.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Personally, I think this is the only way magic could actually work.
PPS - Which makes it a bit non-magical, I suppose.

A lot of clouds

Cloud services I currently use, where "cloud" means some form of data or file synchronisation between a server and a machine of mine:

Dropbox
Windows Live Mesh
Steam
Google Calendar
Picasa Web Albums
Instapaper
Kindle
Google Tasks
Astrid

Is there a better way? Maybe. I think private, peer-to-peer, serverless clouds are the future, and they can provide one standard synchronisation service for all attached data. Building something that can take over from all these systems (perhaps even the closed Kindle) is a vague goal of mine.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I just have a few details to work out first.
PPS - And a lot of fundamentals.

Shaving economics

I have an electric shaver. I've used it as long as I can remember. The cutter and foil need replacing now, and that costs $75 (yes, even on eBay). They recommend you replace those parts every 18 months, which comes out to about $4.15 per month. And if you manage to double the cutter and foil lifespan, as I did, you'll only spend $2.08 per month. If you buy a pack of good disposable razors once a month, that will probably cost you about $10. I'm ignoring shaving cream and aftershave. So the cutter and foil starts to look pretty good.

But here's where things get silly. You can buy a whole new electric razor for $50, and if that lasts you three years, you'll only be spending $1.35 per month, until you have to replace the whole thing again. So the cheapest option of all is to treat your entire electric shaver as disposable and just buy a new one when its parts wear out. And that is a demonstration of how our world generates such prodigious waste. We have optimised our manufacturing for brand new products, not repairs.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I have started using disposable razors.
PPS - At least until I can justify replacing my electric shaver.

Ideas vs execution

Ideas are cheap and easy. Execution is hard. So take those ideas you've been sitting on and go do something about them. Got an idea for a novel? Start writing. Been meaning to make a coffee table for home? Go buy some wood. An idea that's actually been implemented is worth far more than an idea that is hypothetical only. I am terrible at this, which can be seen by the number of posts here where I speculate on something that might be cool, then leave it at that. I rarely execute on my ideas, but I am much more satisfied with them when I do.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Particularly the software I write.
PPS - But also the things I physically build.

Human computing tools

How should computers work for us these days? I think we are ready to move forward to a new generation and I do not think anyone has it right yet. What are we trying to do, what should that look like and how do we get there? We need to know what are the primary, top-level tasks people are doing with their computers and how we can help with that. We Play (including read and watch), Communicate (email, IM, voice and video), Create (draw, write, record, remix) and Work or Organise. I probably haven't covered everything. For instance, shopping online doesn't easily fit into those categories.

There are some simple human-related things that computers need to do well, but they don't tend to come with tools that work that way. We need some messier programs for some things, like holding loosely-correlated notes, videos, sound bites and pictures, and better ways to search them and display those search results. We need to have good ways of displaying search results for events (history), places and people. When, where and with whom did things happen. Those are basic human-centric things we think about, but they're not here for us.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My point is, there's a lot of humanity missing from computers, and what else are they here for anyway?
PPS - Why build machines that don't work well with us?

Health care for prisoners vs the homeless

If we will give a man better health care for being a felon rather than unemployed or homeless, our society has made a wrong turn somewhere. I'm not saying we shouldn't take care of certain people, even people who have wronged us, but I am saying that if the level of care available to a prisoner far outstrips that available to someone starving and dying on the streets, or someone who just can't afford to pay, then something has gone horribly wrong.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then again, some people would refuse it as "charity".
PPS - I don't think health care is one of those helping hands you should turn down.

Friday Flash Fiction - Mossworld

Under a nondescript bench seat, beside an unremarkable inner city road, grows an unassuming patch of moss. Within the miniature rolling hills of that moss, however, lives an entire world that mankind will never know, blazing along at speeds that make mayflies look like ponderous mountains. A conglomerate of civilisations figuratively dancing on the head of a pin. As abruptly as their caves and huts became cities and highways too small for human eyes to see, their world is dying. The moss patch is shrinking and the air is growing stale. Micronations rise and fall in the blink of an eye, and entire wars are fought over precious real estate in what looks like a tiny puff of smoke, or a fungus spore release.

But before their unknown universe collapses, the nano-inhabitants manage to band together and hold on to peace long enough to begin digging down into the earth. Tiny machines manned by tinier people drill deep into the bedrock and hollow out a space for themselves. There they remake their world in miniscule artificial caverns lined with the mosses of their topside lands. They are easily self-sufficient, and their technology would be the envy of any human scientist, if such scientists had any chance of discovering them. But the little world digs deeper and makes a new and better home for itself, unaware of the bigger world in which it lives, never to be seen by human eyes until the end of time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Not far from my office, there is a patch of moss like this.
PPS - I can neither prove nor disprove that it has microscopic civilisations living in it.

Google closing in on itself

The funny thing about Google consolidating and promoting its own services is that it starts feeling like Google is shrinking. When Google was merely the search gateway to the web, it felt like it encompassed everything. Now that they are pushing and preferring their own services over others, it feels like Google is a shrinking corner of the web where if it isn't on Google, it doesn't exist. That's the problematic mindset the walled-garden services had back in the days before the proper internet took over.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - What made Google start thinking this was a good idea?
PPS - Maybe it was Android, at least in part.

Accidentally or manually breaking the DMCA

I wonder, does copying out the contents of a copy-protected PDF by hand constitute a breach of the DMCA? Also, taking photographs of an on-screen document doesn't trigger any copy protection software at all, and requires no special equipment. Technically, it is circumventing a digital lock, but if that's what you were going to do anyway, how would you know the lock was there in the first place? And if the lock fails somehow, you might be able to make a copy in a perfectly ordinary way without triggering it, and again you wouldn't know you had done anything wrong. So what, according to DMCA, actually constitutes circumventing a digital lock, if it might be possible to do so without any intention of bypassing copy protection?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Ignorance is usually no defence.
PPS - So they tell me.

Software project leadership

Software projects, whether games or business software, need a central vision and a leader. For solo projects, that's easy, because there's only one developer, but for bigger projects, if there's nobody in charge and no clear direction, there's going to be a mess at the end. Open source projects are particularly hard to direct if there is no leader with the final say. Once they lose that leader, that vision, they fall apart.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Even professional projects fall apart without leadership and a goal, though.
PPS - And some of them start out on a road to nowhere.

The ultimate MMOG

What would the ultimate, unstoppable MMO look like? Well, it would need to be fully peer-to-peer, so that it could outlive the rise and fall of any given company, or at least free and easy to run a server. And anyone who runs a server (or the world on their personal machine) would need full power over what goes on there. It would need to incorporate gameplay that's both exploration and world-building, combat and defense, and all the best of elements that have made other games successful, preferably through add-on modifications so that it can incorporate any new features that come up, too. And finally it would need to have infinite possibilities for new fun, so that existing players don't burn out on the whole concept and go play something else. That means players need to be creating new content all the time, as part of the game.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Actually, that sounds a lot like the internet itself.
PPS - Except that's not so much a game we're playing.

Portable software

If I were to design an operating system from scratch, I would make every program install and run in a portable way. The only trouble would be saving user preferences, since they might refer to a particular machine, an app, the operating system itself or just the user in any location.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And that's before you consider the same machine on different networks.
PPS - But in general, portable software installations are better.

Friday Flash Fiction - Bitten

Late at night, I was just drifting off to sleep when I heard a sound in my back yard, like something was rummaging around our bins. I was tired, and I figured it was a stray cat, but then I heard the bin tip over, so I figured I'd better investigate. I padded downstairs, bleary and annoyed, then stepped outside into the night to survey the damage.

There seemed to be a small feral child digging through our food scraps. He was injured and wearing just an old nappy, but otherwise seemed healthy. I know it sounds nuts, but believe me it gets worse.

I wasn't sure what you're supposed to do when you find a stray child in your back yard. Take him in? Call the police? Try to scare him off like an animal? I know, I've never been good with kids. I settled on bringing him inside to warm up and then calling the police to handle it.

I called out gently, not wanting to startle him. It turns out he was easily startled. His head snapped up to look at me with equal parts fear and surprise, plus just a little bit of crazy. I tried to approach slowly and say generic soothing things, but when I got close enough to reach out my arm, the little urchin struck out, quick as a snake, and bit me!

I think he ran off, but I don't know for sure. I felt woozy and passed out, then woke up a few hours later, shivering cold. I got myself back inside, took a quick hot shower to warm up, washed and dressed my bite mark (can't believe I got bitten by a feral child), made a mental note to get a tetanus shot or something in the morning, then found my bed, comfy and cozy, to sleep the rest of the night.

I actually slept until sundown, woke up relaxed but hungry. All I had in the fridge that looked appealing were two punnets of strawberries, which I wolfed down. They were really good.

I had a ton of energy, so I went out for a run through the park behind my house. When I saw a couple sitting on a bench I just don't know what came over me, but I felt like I wanted to shoot him with an arrow, and it felt ... positive somehow.

You want to know my theory? It's super-crazy, but ... I think I got bitten by Cupid. And for a while now, I've had to suppress archery-related urges. I don't know if it's going to last, but I really hope it goes away.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - What would it be like if cupidity was transmissible?
PPS - And would it be called "cupidity"?

Google Cloud Print and Chrome

Should Google Cloud Print be a part of Chrome? I don't think so. It doesn't feel like a browser feature to me. It should be a separate service, perhaps installable as part of some hypothetical Google Cloud Services Suite. I realise I may be drawing too much of a distinction between "client" and "server" features here, especially since it's more of a peer-network thing, but Cloud Print is a server-like feature, making your printer available over the internet. That just doesn't seem like a feature that should live in a web browser.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You shouldn't need to install another browser just to share your printer.
PPS - Also, why isn't there a Cloud printer driver to make use of your Cloud Print services?

Subtle acting choices

It's often a tiny little touch that impresses me about an actor's performance on screen. For instance, in one episode of Dexter, where he believes he has been caught, Dexter is walking into someone's office under escort. He has not been arrested, but actor Michael C. Hall holds his hands clasped in front of him, just the way he would if he were handcuffed. That little detail stood out to me as a way of expressing that Dexter feels like he's been caught, even though he doesn't know his status right now. Then there's Carrie-Ann Moss playing a spy on Chuck who has a crush on one of Chuck's coworkers/handlers, played by Adam Baldwin. As she walks away from him, she looks over her shoulder to say "Bye, Casey", and her ankle rolls just a little, putting a wobble in one step. That little motion brings to mind all those awkward crushes of our teenage years into one subtle motion, and I really appreciated its expressiveness. Not a bad impact for two tiny physical motions, is it?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not sure if either of those things were in the script.
PPS - If so, then they were performed perfectly.

Blogs vs Journalism

The question is not whether all blogs have value as journalism, but whether journalism can be done in blog form. Journalists who don't want to be known as "just bloggers" will point to a 12-year-old girl's half-grammatical rants about her teachers and schoolyard enemies on a pink explosion background and say that obviously no journalism can be associated with such as this. And there are plenty of bloggers who wish they were journalists that are doing nothing but rehashing existing reporting with limited commentary. Journalism is hard work, and being respected as a blogger is doubly hard.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This blog is not journalism, and it's not meant to be.
PPS - Most other blogs are the same: ongoing opinion columns.

Mobile devices and local networks

Local mobile or roaming networks are probably going to be more important as time goes on. We network the computers in our homes, but when we're out and about, the only networking we get to do is between each phone and its service provider. The only multi-player games on your phone or tablet are connected to Facebook. The only data sharing you can do is up to a server and back down again, even if we are right beside each other. The mobile network is stressed enough as it is, and it's only going to get worse as more people sign up for more phone and data plans. Eventually, we will need our mobile devices to talk directly to each other.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Imagine a mobile phone network that gets better the more people that join up.
PPS - That's the future.

Extra traffic light colours

Straw-man argument time: we should have an extra warning light in between red and yellow. Something orange, perhaps. That way, you can tell when the yellow light is about to change to red, and make sure you don't go through it. This is a stupid idea because that's exactly what the yellow light is already supposed to do. Adding another layer between yellow and red means that the true meaning of yellow - "stop if you can, this is about to be a red light" - has already been lost or mutated somehow into "go if you want, it's not red yet". How long would it be before the orange light starts meaning that same thing? My guess is that those people who speed through the yellow light will start to really gun it when the orange light comes on. Whatever the real solution, we need something that will automatically make people err on the side of stopping rather than going.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Something like armed drones that fire on anyone who runs the red light.
PPS - Or severe tyre damage spikes that pop up on red.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Scrap Yard

The visitor approaches nervously as I sit atop the pile of rusted car bodies we call my throne. A few acolytes circle silently behind him. I recline and put on my best "disinterested monarch" airs. It's all for show, but it's what people expect.

He clears his throat to try and get my attention, but I don't look down yet. He tries again, then ventures an "excuse me?" I wait just a second more, then as I sense he is turning away I say loudly "Sir!"

"What?"

"You will call me 'Sir' if you want me to listen without taking your voice box as a souvenir."

"I'm sorry. Sir."

I sit on the edge of my throne. "Go on."

"Sir, I have lost something. I heard this was the place to find anything."

"Well, most things. What was it, when and where?"

"A gold necklace, in my apartment," he hesitates "six years from now."

"A lot of lost things turn up here, but six years ago is a long time."

"No not six years ago, six years from now. The future. Sir."

I try to see if he has crazy in his eyes, but he looks like every other supplicant, nervous and hopeful.

I wave to dismiss the other residents of the scrap yard, so we can talk alone. They go quickly and obediently, but every one keeps looking back over their shoulders until they are out of sight. I'd expect nothing less.

I skip over all the incredulous questions - the how and why - to ask what he thinks I can do.

"I've heard rumours," he says, "that you've found things from the future."

"And why would I do this for you?" I ask.

"I'll be very grateful..." I wait. "Sir."

"Come back in a week." I say, finally, "And I'll have your necklace. Be prepared to be very, very 'grateful'. This isn't easy, and I don't have to do it."

"Thank you! Thank you, thank you!" he gushes. I wave him away and rub my temples. I should have kept quieter about the future stuff. It only ever makes things worse when more people come looking for it. But now it looks like I'm searching that way again. I wish it had been the past. The past is so much easier.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've been watching The Finder.
PPS - I guess this story owes something to that show.

Quadrotors

I've seen many videos of mini-quadrotor helicopters and they seem to be the most stable and most maneuverable of small-scale hovering aircraft. So my question is why all the toy helicopters in shops are shaped like actual helicopters and are so hard to control when we have something so much better.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The most popular retail quadrotor available seems to be the "Draganflyer" which is for aerial photography.
PPS - Other than that, it's build-it-yourself instructions.

Training for taste

I find it a very interesting experiment that Mark Serrels performed, trying to force himself to like olives by eating one per day during January. Before, he says, his body retched at the taste of olives. Now, after a month, he actually sort of enjoys them on their own, but when you put them in another context (eg salad, pizza), he still doesn't want them. So here's the question: can you force yourself to develop a taste for a food you physically hate by eating it on its own, or might we still need to overcome some mental barriers to push that tolerance into other contexts?

For me, the food to work at would be prawns - disgusting bottom-feeding vermin of the sea who come to your plate complete with heads and eyeballs. I know most of my fellow Australians get a completely different picture when they think "prawn", something more like "delicious bite-sized package of pink-white meat", but for me it's always been more like "poison spider-flesh with a thousand horrible legs". Perhaps I should try to develop a taste for them, and expand my pallette to be truly Australian.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't have a taste for much seafood, really.
PPS - But I have recently come to appreciate plain old fish.

Teaching programming through gaming

I wonder if you could teach people to program by including programming as part of a game's mechanics. For instance, imagine that you have a game centred around magic, but that magic is cast by means of program-like spells written on scrolls. In order to cast spells for whatever purpose, you need to be able to write a kind of program that does what you want on a scroll. The game would have to teach you some of the necessary skills, of course, and there's still the matter of making sure it's fun.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I am, of course, not a game designer.
PPS - So I may be way off base here.

Minecraft inspiring other games

I think a game as popular as Minecraft is bound to inspire other games. The retro, low-res cube style is simple and easy enough to be done almost anywhere, so it looks like a low barrier to entry, and the fact that everyone likes Minecraft means that people are not just willing to accept low graphics demands, but some actually crave it. It makes Generic Shooter 2012 with its trademark Fluid-modeled Mud Splatter System, Photorealistic Lens Flares(TM) and so on seem overblown. That's more like graphics getting in the way of games, and it also seems like those games put other things ahead of fun as well. Minecraft doesn't bother with flashy graphics at all - it has just enough for the game and that's it.

What will be interesting to see is whether it inspires more new games than modifications to standard Minecraft. That's the difference between "wouldn't it be great if Minecraft did this?" and "I like Minecraft, but what I'd really like is...".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I have played a little more since my Christmas break.
PPS - Look at Cube World and tell me it doesn't owe something to Minecraft.

Action lists programs

I've tried to use Google's Tasks program to keep track of my action lists, but it has always proven inadequate, at least as far as proper GTD practices go. The main reason I use it and not something else is that it's a Google product, so it works well with my phone. But if it doesn't work well with me, then what's the point? It's not Google Tasks I want, but some program that I can access online or offline, on my desktop or my phone, that allows me to set up sequences of tasks easily and to tag them with contexts so I know what type of action they are and can call up the appropriate list when I need it (such as when I am shopping). Google Tasks is just not doing that, and every other program I've looked at so far seems to omit at least one of those requirements - usually offline desktop access and subtask sequences, and quite often context lists. So if I want this imaginary program, I'll have to write it myself.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For now, I'm giving Astrid a try.
PPS - It's not bad.

Friday Flash Fiction - The Invisible Predator

The girl was hallucinating, no question about that, but it was up to us to figure out why. Nobody wanted an outbreak of some unknown hallucinogenic contagion. Once we'd brought her down from the ledge, they shoved her into a plastic room and only allowed two of us in heavy biosuits to go in. Now she was restrained and sedated, but still muttering in her pseudo-sleep.

She had been running through the streets, knocking people down, screaming at the top of her lungs about pigs and lions. The local police cornered her in an office building, but she got out on a ledge somehow. She wasn't going to jump, she said, she just needed to be somewhere the invisible lion couldn't get to her.

In a few moments of lucidity, they had talked her inside, then ... all the officers' accounts were a little different. Some said she went crazy, called them pigs and knocked them down. Some said one of their own got a bit gung-ho, burst through the ranks and subdued her. Whatever happened, she was our problem now.

We drew some blood, hooked her up to a brain monitor, watched and waited. She was sweating like she was in a feverish dream, and her bare feet were cut up pretty badly from the running. Then there was the gash on her arm - deep and fairly long. We took swabs from that for testing, too.

About an hour into the examination, I thought I saw something outside the plastic walls of the temporary isolation chamber. But then when I turned my head to look, it was gone. I went to ask Dr Stevens, the other doctor, whether he'd seen anything, and just for a flash of a second I thought I saw a pig snout inside his glass bubble helmet. I blinked and that was gone, too, but then the low, white shape outside the walls flashed again.

"Stevens? I think I might be infected."

"Yeah, I think maybe I am too. Did you see anything outside the walls?" he asks me.

"Something low and white, like an animal?"

"Wait, shh..." said Stevens, and I refrained from asking "What?". We both hear a sound like claws clicking on the linoleum floor in time with soft padding steps. Then one wall of our plastic bubble room splits open suddenly, and our patient snaps awake and yells "THE LION!" at the top of her lungs. In a tense moment, I have to admit that I don't see a lion there. I see a white wolf. Dr Stevens, backing into a corner, is stammering "B-b-bear! B-b-b-bear!".

The analytical part of my mind is still operating beneath the panic. We are all infected, but we're all seeing a different creature. It is definitely solid, because it split the plastic with a claw, but whatever it is, we can't see it without the infection.

Stevens is calming down, and I motion him to help me wheel the girl's bed out the door, as slow and calm as possible. Keeping our eyes on the creature as it also eyes us, we disengage the wheel brakes and start backing out, through the plastic doors, towards the solid doors of the outer, permanent office where the girl was subdued. The creature keeps pace with us, quietly menacing, and as we reach the wooden doors it crouches back, getting ready to jump.

I shout "GO!" and we hurl the gurney through the doors, jump through after it and somehow manage to close them in time to hear the strange creature thud against them from the other side. It makes no other noise, and doesn't seem to have all the weight you'd expect from a wolf, bear or lion. We brace the doors and radio down for help - we are infected, the girl is safe, but we have a wild animal trapped in the office.

The response is quick, and before we are bundled off to another floor with a bigger plastic room and probably a long quarantine, I see the office through the reopened doors, trying to glimpse the creature again. There is no sign of it, but on the outer wall I see the open window where the girl climbed on the ledge and, for the life of me, I can't remember if we left it open or closed.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This one is based on a dream I had the other night.
PPS - It doesn't feel completely finished, but I'm out of time.

Good enough computing

With today's desktop computers, we've pretty much hit "good enough" processor speeds at 3GHz. We're still squeezing more power out of RAM, multicore architectures, hard disk space and video cards, though. Personally, I wonder at what point we'll get to "good enough" in each of those components, and which one will top out first. Will people be perfectly happy with a 5TB hard drive, and anything larger is a waste, or will we never hit that mark? People are pretty bad at cleaning up after themselves and many consider a full hard drive the signal that it's time to buy a new PC, so it's entirely possible that there is no point where most people will have enough disk space for the indefinite future.

Another reason we may never hit "good enough" is that we always think of bigger, better and more powerful things to do with our computers. A 3GHz processor might be good enough for now, but soon enough people will be wondering why we can't do real-time video processing or some other task, so we'll need more powerful machines again. "Good enough" is relative.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - When you push these boundaries, you get bigger boundaries.
PPS - Eventually.

Unsustainable TV

Maybe TV is not a sustainable model the way we've known it. Maybe there is no way to produce high-quality weekly shows in 20+ episode seasons without broadcast advertising. Maybe that means we need to explore new ways of producing and consuming our entertainment. It won't look much like what we've got now, but maybe it will be better.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or maybe it won't exist at all, and we will just get YouTube.
PPS - And countless low-value indie productions.

Money for artists when art is free

Anything that can be distributed digitally tends towards free, even if people are willing to pay. The money usually needs to come from somewhere else, then, and things that are not free: merchandise and experiences. Meeting someone, talking with them, getting their autograph, seeing them perform their work live, are all experiences that cannot be copied. Official merchandise (mugs, shirts, physical copies of books, music and movies) is relatively easy to copy or knock off, but what you can't copy are the actual props, set pieces and costumes used in filming a movie or TV show. Their uniqueness and history is their value, rather than their shape or materials.

How does this relate to books? As ebooks become more popular and their price tends towards free (however slowly it gets there), the money in writing will have to come from more public appearances by authors, or by selling autographed artifacts, or, most likely, the rights to make movies and TV out of their works. They can't very well sell off the artifacts of their writing in this digital age, or rather, they can, but there aren't enough of them to make money from. "This is the very keyboard on which So-and-so wrote my favourite book!" It's a one-off discussion piece, but selling your keyboard after every book would be hardly worth it. You'd have to sell Skype time or perhaps charge for personal correspondence, which is not just annoying but unwieldy and off-putting.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It will be interesting to see where the world ends up.
PPS - Public appearances and tours will become a lot more important, I expect.

The limits of summarisation

Ideas and words can only be summarised so far before they start losing their essence, in the same way that binary data can only be compressed so far before losing something. You can summarise stories down a long way to a description of the setting and main characters, but in doing so you miss out a lot of the nuances, and a lot of incidental settings and characters too. You can make them shorter to some degree, but eventually, to reach a certain word count, some scenes are going to have to disappear. If you have a story containing one hundred scenes, you can't possibly summarise it to fifty words, or else each single word would have to represent two entire scenes. If it contains twenty essential characters, summarising it in fifteen words won't even let you name them all, let alone describe them or their relationships or what they're doing.

My point is that we like to look for the sound bite version - the quick, easily-digested nugget at the core of some stories, lectures, ideas and subjects, but some things take a long time to say, and you can't say them any faster. It is not a failure of our language, nor of our intellect. Some things are just too rich to be summarised further.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to express ideas more succinctly, though.
PPS - It's a big help, but it is never as rich and deep as the original.

Low-clearance bridges

There are some low-clearance bridges around the world that routinely get hit by trucks, just because they are a few centimetres lower than a standard clearance for some reason. After the third or fourth time they get hit, you'd have to imagine someone at the city council saying "why don't we raise that bridge?" and someone else replying that it would be too disruptive to existing traffic, plus it's not a simple matter of jacking it up and putting in some chocks to keep it there. Bridges are complicated.

So why don't they just dig a trench underneath the bridge to increase the clearance those few extra centimetres? It's much simpler and cheaper, and it could be done in one day. Problem solved. At least until a slightly taller truck figures he can duck under the new slightly-higher bridge.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - They should probably routinely lie about bridge clearances.
PPS - Though they should only under-report them, obviously.

Friday Flash Fiction - Ad Smog

Tommy stepped out his front door and the ads assaulted his eyes right away. Bright flashing lights, radioactive glowing signs hung unsuspended in the air. Buy this. Go there. Eat at Joe's. Just Do It. Spinning and jostling for position, they filled any space they could find. They'd found another loophole in the standard filters. Tommy checked for an update through the neon haze in his vision, but there was none. He briefly considered turning off his contact lenses for the drive to the office, but he had work to catch up on. He'd just have to hope for an ad filter update later today.

The ads were relentless on the highway - reality was barely visible, so most commuters had their cars on automatic. The law said auto drive cars had to stay under 20 kph, keep left and not overtake. With most people on auto, the whole highway was just about deadlocked.

Tommy tried to pull up some work documents to review, but the local network nodes were congested too. Must be a lot of parents trying to entertain their kids with video on the way to school. Well, that and the constant onslaught of advertising trying to download to everyone at once. His local cached copies of the documents might do well enough, most days, but today Tommy knew there were important updates he didn't have yet. He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed heavily.

Just then, through the jungle of bright banners, Tommy saw a council labourer on the side of the road, scrubbing real paint graffiti from a bridge underpass and gathering rubbish in a bag. Without even thinking about it, Tommy pulled out his contacts, opened the door of his barely-moving car and strolled through traffic to lend a hand in a blissfully ad-free and unenhanced environment. The council worker looked up once, nodded in greeting and handed Tommy a shovel without a word.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It would feel like fresh air for the mind.
PPS - I'm reading Vernor Vinge's book Rainbows End where people wear contact lens computers like this.

Siri

The buzz about the voice-activated personal assistant software Siri on the iPhone 4S seems to have settled down now. I wonder whether that means it has seamlessly integrated into people's lives or that it wasn't such a big deal after all. It's taken me a little while to realise, but I think the main advantage of Siri is that it is task-based. If you want to send a message, you go to Siri. If you want to look up a fact, you ask Siri. If you want to check your schedule, you ask Siri. On any other phone, if you have a task in mind, you have to think of what app does that task, find it in your menu and remember how to use it. The fact of apps is a barrier between you and what you want to do. Siri helps break that down, and that's a good thing.

But if it works so well, why isn't there a popular equivalent on desktop machines? Here's the most likely reason:



Look at this video of a man with a Japanese accent struggling to get Siri on his iPhone 4S to understand the word "work". Siri recognises that he wants to send an email, and knows that he needs to specify "work" or "home", but over numerous attempts still fails to find a match. You can hear from his voice that he's getting more frustrated as time goes on. Now, the point is not that Siri should recognise his accent, nor that he should adapt and use an American accent for this word. The point is that Siri should change tactics after a while, because this clearly isn't working.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Digital assistants need to recognise when they're failing and try something new.
PPS - Douglas Adams talked about this as the need for boredom in AI.

Kindle's slightly broken bookmark sync

A problem with the Kindle platform is that you might ruin the progress sync by opening a book on a different device before it is synchronised. The platform sees two bookmarks and chooses the latter, which is wrong. I've done this between my Kindle and my phone, because my phone didn't have a data connection right away to load the latest bookmark online.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - An unreliable network connection should have been designed for.
PPS - Because our wireless networks are significantly unreliable.

Responsibility means inconvenience

A robot dog will never teach you responsibility. If you forget to "feed" it, no big deal. Just plug it in later, when you remember. Forgot to walk it? Who cares? It's not like it makes a mess in the house. It won't need washing or brushing (unless it has fake fur), and you won't ever need to check it for fleas and ticks. It won't chew your shoes, bark all night or anything like that, which is good, but a pet that you can switch off, put away in a cupboard and forget about for a month or two is not a pet. It's a toy, and will always be a toy until it comes with crippling inconveniences. That, in a very real and practical way, is the meaning of responsibility: having to trade off your own happiness and convenience for the well-being of a person or creature that depends on you. When that need is designed not to outweigh your own wants (as in the case of a robot dog) then you are not responsible for it any more than you are responsible for keeping your TV plugged in.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We've pretty much built our modern society on greater convenience.
PPS - And that means we don't know responsibility any more.

Organising ad-hoc information

Sometimes I get disheartened about my options for organising and capturing information. When I'm at the stage of vaguely contemplating a project, such as building myself the ultimate bedside table, I'll have lots of random thoughts, sketches and research threads to track. And keeping it all together semi-coherently just doesn't happen. I can make notes and keep them in a text file, but if I make a baseline sketch, I'll need to manually digitise it, file it and annotate it to keep it with the rest of the project notes. What I really want is a tool that I can draw in, type in, use like rearrangeable index cards and generally just capture all my thoughts in whatever format they come to me. It sounds amazing, but it's nowhere near reality yet.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It might be too busy with all of those features, though.
PPS - Unless it's really well designed.

Growing medium companies into global ones

Economically, the world is spreading apart. Bigger corporations are ever expanding as always, but there is also a resurgence in smaller industry, also known as cottage industry. But there are other corporations in the middle - too big to give each customer personal attention, and too small to compete globally. How do those companies cross that gap from micro-industry to mega-industry? While they grow, they need to maintain the ability to treat each customer as a valued individual, and they can't take great advantage of economies of scale until they grow large enough to be a global megacorporation. Maybe they need to grow as a chain of micro-business units, each individually managed and semi-independently operated, like a franchise.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm just interested in the issues that come up when you reach that point.
PPS - It must be tough to seek growth as a company like that.

Friday Flash Fiction - Lucky

Among the superheroes and villains of this city, they called me "Lucky", and I never quite fit in with either group. Oh, I could have, I just chose not to. I didn't want to run around in a mask dressed in bike spandex fighting crime, but likewise I didn't want to use my powers for evil and cause all those spandex-wearing wannabes to come after me just to make a name for themselves. Mostly I used my powers just to have really good luck at an ordinary life. I won several "Ten-Thousandth Customer!" competitions as I did my ordinary shopping, the bank was constantly making errors in my favour, and I always got good traffic, good job offers, and generally good timing. I led a charmed life, when I used the luck.

When I turn it off again, probability kind of snaps back into place. Like a rubber band, you eventually have to let go, and there's a sting in the tail. The longer it's been on, and the less likely the outcomes I've been experiencing, the harder the fall. Once I won $20,000 in a radio competition, then crashed my car on the way to pick it up. Broke both my collar bones. Still totally worth it.

It was just that one time, the casino weekend that stretched into a week, then a month. I kept winning, of course, but I also kept drinking, and I had to keep the luck turned on to avoid getting caught by the casino thugs who don't like winners. I thought it would be fun, just to stretch the power and see how far it could go, really test my limits. Now I think it's just gone way too far, and it's too late to turn it off, or something awful and probably fatal will happen immediately. I'm up in the casino's hotel penthouse for now - they're hoping I'll spend away my winnings rather than bankrupt them - and looking out the window over the city. Behind me, I'm sure it's my doom being examined on the TV.

"A week ago, astronomers noticed the asteroid, called BES-0114 or 'Bessie', hurtling towards Earth on a direct collision course. Debate still rages over whether it's big enough to cause any damage, and whether it will hit us at all, but as the days go on, the measurements get more precise..."

I know exactly where it's going to hit: right where I am. But maybe, if I'm lucky, it will be too small to hurt anyone else.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd like Lucky to be a reluctant member of a superhero group.
PPS - I don't have a story for them yet, though.

Sending links between desktop and phone browsers

I've been looking for a while for an app, plugin or service that allows me to easily move browser tabs between my desktop and my phone, both ways. So far, to send a URL to my phone, I would convert it to a QR code via a Chrome app, then scan that code with my phone and open it that way. To send a URL back to my desktop, I'd just have to email the link to myself.

Lifehacker recently featured 2SendTab for Android that might be just the thing I need, allowing me to post and retrieve links on all of my devices in any direction. The only problem I have is that it involves yet another web app that requires yet another login account, and some days that alone is enough to turn me away.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If Chrome synchronised its tabs with Android, I might not even need this.
PPS - But I imagine that's a hassle in its own right.

Walk in their shoes

All political and business leaders should be forced through a period of homelessness for no less than a month at some point in their careers, preferably repeatedly. If we must set up a place for them to do so where they will not be followed or recognised, so be it. I think it's important that the people at the very top of our society fully sympathise with those at the bottom, by literally walking in their shoes.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's probably not a bad idea for most people, regardless of their station and status.
PPS - Assuming you don't get badly and permanently injured or ill in the process.

How to open PDFs in Google Chrome by default

When Adobe Reader annoyed me for the last time, I realised something: I don't ever actually need that program. So I configured Windows to open PDFs by default in Google Chrome. Here's how to do it in Windows 7:
1. Right-click a PDF and select "Open With" then "Choose Default Program".
2. Click the Browse button.
3. Find the Chrome executable (which is usually under C:\Users\[your_name]\AppData\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe). Select it and click "Open".
4. Make sure the "Always use the selected program to open this kind of file" checkbox is ticked and click "OK".
From now on your PDFs will open automatically in Google Chrome instead of Adobe Reader. Feel free to uninstall Adobe Reader and never think of it or its stupid face again.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course this only works if you have Google Chrome installed.
PPS - And if you ever deal with PDFs.

Engineering as art

There's still a fair amount of art involved in engineering. Yes, it's science as applied to construction or industry, but the science is done separately to the design. The science discovers properties of materials or methods, but when it is applied in design it comes out more like speculative mathematics. If we did it this way, what would happen? Okay, how about this way instead? Deciding what path to pursue and designing the way to apply the science is still an art you learn with time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is why, so far, engineers have not been replaced by software.
PPS - If programmers can ever be replaced by software, we'll be in the singularity.

Duolingo

I love the concept of duolingo.com: learn another language for free while helping to translate the web. It's brilliant, simple, and ticks all the right boxes for a project like that. I've signed up to learn Spanish, but I haven't used it much yet. The one concern I have is that they say their aim is to translate the whole web into all major languages, but I probably produce more English text in a day than I would get through on duolingo in a week, and that's just me. If not everyone is participating, and they have to aggregate translations to get good results, and furthermore the participants are producing more new native language text than they are translating daily, the project is going to start behind and get further behind as time goes on. Granted, it's better than starting behind and staying still, and if you focus your efforts on major websites like Wikipedia, you probably will get through a reasonable amount quickly, so I think it's definitely worthwhile. If you've ever wanted to learn another language (and you probably have) then this is a good way to go, if only because it's free.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wonder whether a similar concept could work for programming languages.
PPS - The task would have to be platform-porting.

Friday Flash Fiction - Time Step

We discovered the Time Step by accident one day while we were practicing some new moves for a dance-off. Jason said he had something new he wanted to try out, so we gave him the space. He started out pretty standard, looking like he was just warming up to the music, finding his rhythm, then he did this weird thing where he stood on one foot and kind of started flapping his arms. I started to laugh at it, then he got this surprised look, there was a *whump* like someone dropping something huge onto thick carpet and he was just gone! We panicked right away, and we looked everywhere for him, and just when we figured we should call someone, there was that same sound and he was back again, right in the spot where he disappeared, standing in that same stupid pose with the same surprised expression.

"Jason, what the hell? You've been gone for an hour!" said Max, our crew leader.

"I dunno, man. I was just doing like this..."

We all shouted "STOP!" just as Jason stood on one foot again. Idiot was going to do it all over.

We figured out eventually that Jason stumbled on some kind of voodoo move that sent him just a little way into the future. Who knew how it worked, and it looked stupid as hell, but it was amazing. We started trying it, after Jason failed to get sick or drop dead, and it only seemed to work in certain places, but anyone could do it once they knew how. Mitch found a kind of spinning flip that looked awesome and sent him almost exactly four beats ahead, so we figured we could use it in our routines sometimes, especially for big finales.

So that's what we practiced. We worked out this incredible routine - one of our best, I have to say - that finished with Mitch jumping ahead a few seconds and the rest of us timing our landing to his. It was beautiful.

When we went to perform, we had everyone on their feet even before we reached the ending they'd never forget. Mitch hit his jump right on cue, and the rest of us landed just right to match him ... only Mitch never reappeared. Someone thought we'd used some stage magic or something, until they saw that we were all kind of shocked. We waited for hours that night for Mitch to come back, but he never did.

I still go back to that club now and then. It's abandoned and run-down now, but I figure one of these days Mitch is going to reappear to finish that move. I'm not sure what else to do, so I leave a newspaper to let him know how long he's been gone. We really should have known it would be different in a different place, but we can't fix that now.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I just had a weird idea about a dance move that made you time-travel.
PPS - This is what came out of that.

Windows app store development loses to Java

When discussing the upcoming Windows 8 and its app store, Microsoft showed a chart like this, to show relative market share:

Well, not exactly like that. The "WP7 share" mark was added by Scott, and his was the only source of this image I could find. The big blue dot is Windows, at 500 million installs. Leaving aside whether or not that number is accurate (probably not), the next one, the green dot, is Google's Android, a mobile OS, presumably included because it, too, has an app store.

The point I gather Microsoft was trying to make was that the Windows blob is the biggest, so you should develop for that. My own reaction is that I didn't realise Android was so huge, and the big green blob makes me want to do Android development. Also, it would be easier if I just focused on Java development, since that's Android and Windows covered together, the two biggest blobs, which is a double-bad hit for Microsoft, because I'd be moving away from Windows as my only development focus, and also because I wouldn't be using their tools any more either.

So Microsoft's intended response from developers like me is:
"Wow, Windows is the biggest platform out there! Golly, gee, I should definitely be focusing on that instead of those other crummy platforms!"

And my actual response is more like:
"Hm. Android is pretty darn big, and Java runs on it and Windows. I could get an even bigger reach by switching to Java instead."

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Not exactly a win.
PPS - Then again, I'm still developing on Windows for now.

Laplink PCmover Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant

At work, I was furnished with a loan laptop while my new PC is on order. It was running Windows XP, and although I should only have to put up with this for a few years (at our IT support's glacial pace) I figured I would have a better time of it if I upgraded myself to Windows 7. I was wary of having to reinstall all my old software again, though, so I used Laplink's PCmover Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant to help me along. I am writing to warn you against doing the same.

Though the program appeared to run properly on the Windows XP side of things, packing up a file it called a "moving van", after the installation of Windows 7, everything went to hell. I started getting errors on startup from programs that I could no longer uninstall or disable. All of my software failed to run and had to be reinstalled. Some of it produced errors when I tried to run the uninstallers, leaving my machine in a very unusable state. Ironically, I would have been in a better position if I had not taken any special steps to preserve my files, settings and programs, since then I would only have had to install new copies rather than wrestling with Windows to let go of the old, corrupted ones. And to pour salt onto these wounds, all of my hardware drivers, including the vital network port, had failed to transfer, too.

Of course your experience may vary, and they have cherry-picked some positive reviews to post on their website about the product. They also have some warnings about incompatible software and some that may need to be unregistered before upgrading Windows, then re-registered later, but when "some programs" means "every program" and "unregistered" seems to mean "uninstall", what benefit do you get from such a process?

In short, Laplink's PCmover made my transition from Windows XP to Windows 7 actively worse, and I recommend fleeing in the opposite direction.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I really wanted this to work.
PPS - But it seems the dream of a smooth upgrade from XP to Windows 7 is still just a dream.

Happiness comes before success

I shared this on Facebook yesterday, but it's impacted me so much that I wanted to show it here, too:


The basic message is that we have it backwards: we work harder to be more successful and hope therefore to be happier. But we perform our best when we are happy now, so we need to focus on that. He presents it really well, and I can't do it justice in a paragraph summary. You'll be glad you watched it, I promise, but in case you can't do that, you need to do these five things today instead:

1. Write down 3 new things you are grateful for.
2. Journal one positive experience from the past 24 hours.
3. Exercise.
4. Meditate or pray.
5. Email someone in your support network to compliment or thank them.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then keep doing that every day for three weeks.
PPS - That's straight from the video, too.

Travel computing

There are two options for travelling computing. Either mobile network access or offline data and opportunistic sync. Neither covers every case. The advantage of mobile network access is that everything you need is as fresh and up to date as possible. The obvious downside is that the network is not available everywhere and compared to what you've got locally it's very slow. Besides that, sometimes you have to work with files that are enormous and just too big to transfer remotely.

The other option is synchronisation, but it obviously has its own problems. You need to know in advance which files you need so you can download them while you have access, and if you're not the only one working on them, you might need to merge your changes with someone else's when your copies synchronise again. The advantages are that anything you have downloaded will be available immediately, regardless of how unreliable or unavailable the network is, and the synchronisation can just work in the background without bothering you.

Is there a way to get the best of both worlds? Either one of those can get closer to ideal, but I don't know what the final answer should be.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My preference is offline data with sync.
PPS - Possibly just because I've found mobile networks so unreliable.

Private cloud operating systems

Private clouds are where most corporations will find the most value, and for that they need off-the-shelf operating systems to do the heavy lifting for them. At the moment, cloud computing means purchasing time, space and bandwidth for specially-created apps from a third-party provider that may or may not be trustworthy and may be required to hand over data to some untrustworthy government depending on where the cloud service data centre is hosted. To avoid those uncertainties and hassles, large companies will seek to turn their own data centres into flexible clouds, which means they need a server operating system built for such a thing. If the purpose of such a cloud is to run virtual Windows servers, then it won't much matter whether the underlying OS is Linux-based, so I can imagine that being the first place such a product will come from.

Converting will still be a pain, since you'd have to keep all your existing servers online while you switch, but imagine being able to add a new server to a data centre, install an off-the-shelf operating system and entering a few configuration parameters, then it goes and adds itself to the cloud of local machines, including sharing its storage, offering its CPU for new threads and its RAM for direct addressing. Whenever another machine dies, all the storage is already backed up onto other machines and whatever processes it was running can be resumed on other CPUs in other RAM. That's the power of cloud computing without the dangers.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Cloud computing is getting a lot of hype.
PPS - But there are also some problems.

Friday Flash Fiction - Forgotten Apocalypse

Our lives, our very minds, are digital these days. The upside is that an event can truly be undone. Words can be taken back once spoken by deleting them from the recipient's mind, if they're willing. Entire tragedies can be averted by restoring from backups. That's what I think happened. Somewhere in our past - at a very specific time index, actually - there is a gap in all our records. I think, somewhere in that gap, we did something awful, collectively, and erased our own memories to avoid dealing with it.

I've looked over all the backups, and they've all been altered or erased. I've looked out on the world through the cameras and satellites, but everything looks the same as it always has. There are old highways and buildings, disused now except for the maintenance robots that keep the power flowing. All normal. Eerily normal.

So I take a remote bot out where things can't be erased. I start exploring the old cities to see what we might have missed. Did we leave marks on this world that we couldn't wipe away? The cities are clean. Too clean. Pristine. Whatever we did, it happened here, but we paved it over.

Outside the fields there is rich farm land. Robots are growing crops and spraying them with fertiliser. I pause for a moment. Why are we doing this? Nostalgia? Environmental balance? I stop one of the farmer-bots and inquire:

?:- Why do we do this
.:- it is required
?:- Where does the fertiliser come from
.:- the tanks underground
?:- And what fills the tanks
--- MEMORY MISSING ---

I realise I have come back to reality with no memory some time after my conversation with the farmer-bot. This time there is my own digital signature on a remnant deletion command, logged just a moment ago. Whatever I learned, clearly I did not want to remember it, and I left myself a message in the form of that signed deletion: don't go back. It's hard not knowing what I learned about those fertiliser tanks, and it doesn't seem like it should drive me to erase my own memory, but that is clearly what happened. For now I will let it be, but I doubt I will keep my secret - our societal secret - from myself forever.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The power to erase the past would undoubtedly be abused.
PPS - As is all power, eventually.

Tasks and Projects in computers

We need our computers and our technology to be arranged around Tasks and Projects. We shouldn't need to think in terms of apps and websites. It shouldn't matter that I am browsing to Facebook with Google Chrome. What I am thinking of when I do this is connecting with my friends - communicating, catching up. My goal was never to use Facebook itself. Facebook is a means to an end. My Task is what matters to me, and I can do it any way I please.

Similarly, when my hard drive is arranged into drives and folders, and I have this list of recently opened files in Word, this different list in Excel and a separate email folder for certain things in Outlook, where do I find what I've been working on? I don't want files, folders and apps on my computer. I want Projects, where all the data for one project is organised together, and any apps I have open inside there are incidental - they exist only because they are part of that Project context. The only reason I have to think of Word and Excel at all is because they are awful at maintaining context together.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've ranted along these lines before.
PPS - I should really write an essay about it or something.

Invisible traffic calming

I wonder if you could design subtle traffic calming like long wavy roads that you only notice at speed. That is, when you travel at the speed limit, you don't notice anything unusual about the road, but as soon as you go over the limit, it starts feeling funny because you're encountering subtle bumps and curves just a bit too quickly. It should make you subconsciously want to slow down and obey the limit.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In practice, it would probably be too small a change to notice and be effective.
PPS - But it would be interesting to try.

Iced coffee

I have a new iced coffee technique to use at work. Long story short, I put an ice cube in the mug, then get a single shot of hot espresso over it. Melt the ice by stirring, then sweeten and add milk to taste.

I tried "New Orleans"-style cold brewing in a jar overnight, but it was too weak for me. I prefer the stronger taste of espresso, which I used to cool with milk after the sugar dissolves, but cooling with ice immediately seems to make it taste even better. The down side, of course, is that I need to prepare ice at work, which is a pain, but not impossible. And if I run out of ice, I can still fall back on milk-cooling. If you're an iced coffee fan, I recommend giving this method a go.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I tried a couple of times to use milk ice for this, but it didn't work so well.
PPS - I've heard this is called "Japanese-style" iced coffee.

Shopping centre wireless internet

We're getting to the point where WiFi should be a service provided by shopping centres to their tenants. Too many have their own set up, and I'm sure it's causing problems in some areas. The added bonus is that customers can also use the wireless internet, either for free or through some kind of charge system.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then again, that might almost put those internet booths out of business.
PPS - The funny thing is, you never know what side-effects a move like this might have.

Christmas light attachments

Every year, when we put up Christmas lights, we struggle to find a good way to attach them to bricks. Usually we use tac - sticky blobs of goop designed for temporary attachments - and every year they fall down. Tape doesn't stick long enough either. What I'd like to be able to do is 3D-print some custom brackets that snap onto my brickwork somehow and allow me to thread the light cables through. That way they should stay put, the lights work properly, there's no gunk on my bricks afterwards and I can reuse them next year. If I had the modelling software, I could probably order them straight from Shapeways or something.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - But then again, for the sake of easy attachment, it might be too expensive.
PPS - I haven't really looked into it.