What should in-car computers do?

Dedicated navigation devices for cars are very likely on the way out, being displaced by free services on smartphones like Google Maps. The question for me is what's next for those companies and what's next for car hardware. The companies, if they're smart about it, will want to switch to providing their navigation software as apps on the major phone systems. They might try charging money for them, which may be taken up by enough people if their product is superior. Most manufacturers will probably fail, though.

As for in-car hardware, I think the latest batch of high-end in-car stereos offers a horrifying glimpse into the future. A lot of car manufacturers seem to have caught wind of the idea that "Those young people today like the Twitters, right? Can we put all the social medias in our cars?" It's awful, it's distracting (in an age when distraction is becoming the number 1 killer on our roads) and it misses the point entirely.

What we should be trying to put in our car computers are things like:

- GPS logging and navigation
- Fuel usage and other instrumentation
- Music storage, sync and playback
- Dashcam integration

The one thing I'm not yet sure about is whether these in-car computers should be providing their own wireless connectivity or should be linking to smartphones. Each way has its pros and cons. My best guess is that at least one manufacturer will try to lock you into an ongoing mobile data subscription for your car computer that only works with their network.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If someone makes a bad product, you can be sure they'll try to handcuff you to it.
PPS - The next best thing to customer loyalty is customer imprisonment.

Source control to manage third-party database changes

Occasionally at a previous job, we ran into a problem with our databases where a client DBA had modified the schema, a stored procedure or a function somehow, without telling us, and then some changes we made would overwrite theirs. The way we usually worked around that was by carefully (manually) comparing the production schema to our development version, figuring out which changes conflicted with theirs and (again, manually) merging them, then testing, then deployment.

This is time-consuming, error-prone and very annoying. Distributed version control offers a better option.

Here's how it would work. We would keep a copy of scripts for our schema (exported by SQL Server Management Studio) in a Git repository branch. We would keep another branch for the production system. Before deployment, to determine if there are any changes by the DBA that need to be incorporated, we do another export on that end, check it into their Git branch, then attempt a merge with the development branch. Conflicts will be automatically detected and highlighted by Git, so they can be very easily seen. Once any conflicts are dealt with, we generate our deployment scripts and update the production database.

I suppose this doesn't really have to be done with distributed version control, as such. As long as there are separate, comparable repositories for the two environments that allow changes and conflicts to be detected automatically and merged, then you have a better solution than manual comparisons. Also, this isn't really a novel use of version control, either. This is exactly what version control was designed to do, except that one person doesn't have to be aware that the version control system even exists, but everyone still benefits from it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I am currently using this source control technique to help with my church's website.
PPS - It's a much smaller scale problem, but the solution holds up nicely.

Cooking is very complex art

Cooking shows always impress upon me how particular a craft it is. You have to produce a meal in a limited amount of time (or else everyone goes hungry) and it has to appeal to your senses of taste, touch (texture), smell and sight. Both of these requirements make cooking far more challenging than any other art form. Painting can take as long as you want and only has to look good. Ice sculpture has to happen in a short time, and it has to look good, but probably doesn't have to feel nice and definitely doesn't have to taste or smell nice. A performance - dance, singing or acting - has to happen in one go, but again only has to appeal to one or two senses.

You get the idea. If anyone can think of another art form or craft as demanding as cooking, I'd be very interested to hear about it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My cooking couldn't be described as "art".
PPS - Unless you're being very charitable.

A reverse-secret society

I "started" a reverse secret society as a joke, whose membership consists of everyone who hasn't heard of it yet. It's so secret that its own members don't even know it exists. Congratulations on your excommunication! You are now a non-member of "The Ignoramii". That name was suggested by one of the first non-members on the original Facebook post that exposed (and therefore began shrinking) the membership from "everyone in the world" to "everyone but a few of my closest friends". And now to "everyone but the readers of my blog, too". It's like Godel's Incompleteness Theorem applied to secret societies.

It's just a silly, strange joke, of course, but it makes me laugh. For instance, can I be said to have created it, since, by the time I made it up, I was no longer a member? Maybe I'm more like the "discoverer". Does that suggested name have any validity at all, since it was also created by a non-member? There's no way back in (except, I suppose, amnesia) and no way for anyone to truly define anything about the society, either. Also, anyone outside the society can kick people out, but those inside can't invite anyone in.

It reminds me a bit of "Wonko the Sane" in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, who built his house inside-out and called it "Outside the Asylum", because he realised the world had gone insane. Also a bit like Futurama's "Voter Apathy Party" where you can only get in if you don't care enough to get in. I also like imagining the conversations it could bring up:

"Hey, what's it like being a member of the reverse-secret society?"
"The what?"
"The secret society where you're only a member until you hear about it."
"Huh. It was fine, I guess, until just now."
"Oh, yeah. Right. Sorry."

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You can try to submit your resignation to just about anyone you meet.
PPS - The problem is, once they try to accept it, they're out, too.

Returning to the golden age of air travel

There's a certain amount of nostalgic talk about the "golden age" of air travel, when airlines had style, seats had space and flying was a comfortable, pleasant luxury rather than a messy, smelly, exhausting, time-consuming, unreliable, scary affair.

You can still fly in the comfort and enjoyment of that time. You just need to buy a business-class ticket for 4 times the price of economy. Airlines are still willing to treat you like people rather than cattle, as long as you have money. And, oddly enough, business-class tickets are proportionally about as expensive as it was to fly in the "golden age", too. So what's really happened is that corners were cut and concessions were made in order to bring air travel within reach of a much larger market.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And cavity-search security. That happened, too.
PPS - You're also allowed to bypass that for money.

Anti-net-neutrality is just a denial of service attack

Here's an interesting way to illustrate the hypocrisy in the anti-net-neutrality debate. Feedly was recently hit by a DDoS attack, slowing down traffic and making the site unusable. The criminals behind the attack demanded money to make it stop.

Now, read that again, only substitute "Netflix" for "Feedly" and "Comcast throttling" for "DDoS attack". Both of these events are crimes (though I am not a lawyer, so don't take my word for that). One is being considered for legalisation in the USA. The only difference is that Feedly was able to solve the problem without paying up.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This kind of shennanigans has to stop.
PPS - I mean on both sides, but definitely on the cable company side first.

I miss sleepovers

You know what I miss? Sleepovers. It's weird, but sometimes I just long for a party weekend where it all just keeps going until everyone is too tired to stay up, then we all have breakfast together the following morning. I'm not sure what that says about me. Maybe it was just a good time in my life and I don't feel like it lasted long enough. Maybe I'm lonely since all my friends moved away or had kids and couldn't see us any more. Maybe I don't feel like I appreciated what I had at the time. I want to go back and tell my younger self to stay up later, say yes to new things, let people in, stop trying to be seen as the scary one. Maybe I wasn't ready to grow that much at that time. I don't know. I just know I miss it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Some unfinished parts of my life I've been able to mourn.
PPS - This one is more of a puzzle.

Committees vs good ideas

During a recent sermon, one of my Facebook posts was quoted. The quote was:

"Committees are where good ideas go to die."

Hearing it out of someone else's mouth made me uncomfortable more than proud. It's a very negative saying, and it isn't completely true on its surface. Not every idea gets killed in committees, and not every committee is a death trap for good things. There are plenty of people in the world who serve on committees that do good, or at least do the best they can with the limited resources and information they have.

The problem is what we make of those other committees. The bigger they are, the slower they move. They'll be more likely to include someone who, for whatever reason, needs to have their mark on everything, and sometimes that means saying "no" to every possible idea until they have changed it significantly enough to be a contributor, even if the idea is already in its best possible form.

That's how committees kill ideas. Not through their nature, but through the nature of some of their members and their mass. More people means more potential anchors, which means less activity.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't sit on any regular committees.
PPS - Or any irregular ones, come to think of it.

Commonwealth bank security vs convenience

I've started to use the Commonwealth Bank mobile app for a lot of the little management tasks for my accounts, just because it lets me log in with a PIN instead of a username and password. It's much more convenient and faster than the website. Of course, it's also a bit more annoying to have to use the small touch screen than a mouse and keyboard, so it's a trade-off. So far, though, the convenience of the login is beating the usability of the computer desktop.

The desktop website is deliberately written to prevent any browser password manager from remembering your password. I don't memorise my passwords, myself, because they're stronger if they're unique, randomly-generated and long. For me, this makes its usability much lower.

I think, together, this says something about security and convenience, in that people will choose greater convenience over security when they can. I know I have.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Except for the complicated, unmemorisable passwords.
PPS - I've made sure to stick to that.

DRM and ownership

I think we need to stop talking about being able to "own" media that is tied to a particular online distributor and locked up in DRM. I can't "own" a Kindle book if Amazon can forcibly unload it from my devices. I don't "own" TV shows if I can lose access to them because of a network outage or a business going bust. That's a service agreement, not ownership, so that's the way we should talk about it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I haven't been able to keep myself from buying DRM-locked goods.
PPS - I don't consider any of those purchases really mine as long as they're under DRM.

When solar power will become viable

The point at which solar power becomes economically viable is probably driven more by the rising cost of fossil fuels rather than the slow and steady advances in efficiency and affordability in solar power itself. At some point, those graph lines - the falling cost of solar and the rising cost of oil - are going to cross over, and that's when solar will start to become far more important to the primary energy production companies of Earth.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd like it if solar were important to them already.
PPS - However, I think that misses the fact that money is their motivator, not environmental concern.

Understanding vs agreeing

The very idea of rational debate hinges on the notion that you can understand someone without agreeing with them. If the act of understanding someone automatically conferred agreement, then every informal debate would be over as soon as one person decided to examine another person's claims.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Conversely, you need to understand your opponent's points in order to argue them.
PPS - Otherwise we're just shouting at each other.

Gender-flip to understand gender issues

If you have to gender-flip something to understand why it's so bad, then go ahead and do it. It still says something is fundamentally broken with our society, though. We can't see injustice unless it's personalised to our point of view, but if it gets the job done, I think it's worth doing.

And if you gender-flip some gender-based social justice issue and it still sounds like it's not a big deal, there's only one real possibility: you haven't understood what you're looking at.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This post pretty much inspired by this series of gender-flipped Tomb Raider images.
PPS - They're kind of ridiculous, in the best possible way.

Late communication

Late communication with support staff (I'm thinking IT support in particular, because that's my area of experience) leads to poorer service. It's not because they're bad at their jobs - far from it, in most cases - but when you only call them at the point where it's last-minute urgent, they can't set priorities in their work. They have to drop everything and focus on you, and then focus on the next catastrophe and so on. It leaves no time to keep the system as a whole in working order. It also means that your service is going to remain in its worst possible, barely-functional state at all times, because none of the issues are going to get fixed until the last minute.

I see it in software development, too. Clients will sometimes withhold information on requirements until the last minute, either to avoid "overwhelming" the development team or to manage the sequence of development. Neither one works very well, because decisions can only be based on what is known so far, and sometimes a wildly different decision would be made with all the information up front. If a developer doesn't know that, for instance, the next requirement up from "get this working for one user" is "now make it work for my whole team", a decision may be made to work on a single-user-focused platform like Access rather than something suited to teams.

The lesson is to do as much communication as possible up front. That way, everyone knows what's coming, conflicts come up right away when they're cheapest to fix, priorities and plans can be set and everyone knows what everyone else is thinking. Even if you don't know what's coming, communicate what you can. I promise it will go better that way.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Some things will still be missed, I know.
PPS - Mostly it's because some things seem obvious to one person and not to another.

Naked DSL internet is just as expensive as line rental plus ADSL

What I don't understand about naked DSL plans is that they all seem to be $20-$30 more than the equivalent regular ADSL plans, which is exactly how much you're supposed to be saving on line rental. For instance, on TPG, you have this:

ADSL2+ 100GB/month: $29.99
Naked DSL2+ 100GB/month: $49.99

That's the equivalent of a $20 line rental when Telstra charges $30. So you're not really saving all your line rental fees. Just a third. On iiNet it's this:

ADSL2+ 100GB/month: $29.95
Naked DSL2+ 100GB/month: $59.95

That's the full line rental fee you're not saving. The higher iiNet naked DSL plans are only $20 more than their equivalents, though, so that's the same $10 saving as TPG. The thing is, we were sold on these plans as a way to save your line rental fee, which makes sense as a concept, but if the fee is just built into the plan instead, that's broken. The only reason I'd do it is to avoid having a home phone, and I can do that anyway by not plugging one in.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That's what I'm currently doing.
PPS - It worked out cheaper for me to do it that way.

Personal lock-out is kind of tricky

My step-sister has this exam-time ritual for staying off Facebook. She has someone else change her password, so when she wants to get on Facebook, she needs to go and ask that person to log her in. It involves a fair amount of trust on her part, but since her mum is her go-to gatekeeper, it's fairly safe. I know that there are browser extensions that can limit your time on websites - I use StayFocusd, myself - but I wondered whether there was any way you could lock something up and only let yourself back in at a specified time, without involving any self-discipline. Also, since this is a password situation, it would be better to avoid any insecure third-party systems like email delays.

Obviously you want to encrypt the password. That's a given, or else everything else is pointless. The trouble is, that doesn't get you anywhere on its own. The encryption needs a key, and if you need to get in later, then you need that key, so you'd better hold onto it. But now you're back where you started, trying to keep the encryption key secret from yourself until the designated time.

The only thing I can think of is encryption that's relatively breakable, but will take some time to crack. If you encrypt your Facebook password in a file with this encryption that will take, say, three hours of computer time (on your own PC) to unlock, that might work. Unfortunately, there's no actual way to predict exactly how long a crack will take. It might unlock on the first try, cutting 3 hours down to practically zero. In all likelihood, if it's going to take 3 hours to try everything, you'll probably get it done in half that time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess, if you encrypt the password, keep the key and then use a third-party delay system, that might work.
PPS - As long as you destroy all your local copies.

Monopolies and scope of choice

Monopolies affect the scope of choices you make, especially as they expand their interests. You can, say, choose not to register on Facebook, but at a certain point, that choice is synonymous with not keeping in touch with your friends. You can choose not to pay for the crappy service from one particular internet provider, assuming there is another competitor with better service. You can choose not to subscribe to this or that online video service, but that is also choosing to miss out on their exclusive content. You can choose, as an artist, not to list your music on iTunes or your books on Amazon, but you'll be cutting yourself off from 90% of sales. The more power an individual company has, the less free you are to choose not to do business with them, because that choice means more than boycotting one individual company. Often it means boycotting an entire line of business instead.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - When you can't afford not to do business with someone, that's a problem.
PPS - Whether it's a monopoly or not.

Versatility or safety

Versatility is often in a trade-off relationship with safety and complexity. A stanley knife is versatile, but so difficult to use safely that they are banned by most safety-conscious organisations in favour of more specialised tools. Those tools, of course, form a more complex set than the old stanley knife, each with its own mode of use. They're more complex to use, they take up more space and it's harder to know, without training, which one is right for the job at hand.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - When making the trade-off, always ask yourself which is more valuable: versatility or safety.
PPS - Sometimes, the risk is worth it.

I want a whole-home filing system

Cory Doctorow wrote about a theoretical home organisation system in Makers that was called "Home Aware". You get a lot of plastic tubs to put things away, they use RFID tags to recognise objects and a central database where item locations are tracked. He brushed aside the data entry requirements by saying that they'd have people come in and do it for you, over the course of a day or two. If you're looking for an item, you just ask the database and the right tub lights up. If you want to put something away, you just find a tub with enough space and do it. The RFID reports the item to the database and its location is updated. I would very much like to try that system out, even if it meant I had to keep tagging and adding new items as we buy them or as we put our existing stuff away.

What would be interesting would be the accumulation of metadata - what items come and go from which tubs most often, what hasn't moved in six months and might be worth selling or giving away. An item that's gone missing - not being seen in any tubs for a while - can be flagged so people can look out for it. You don't even have to do all the data entry yourself. You could tag new items quickly with a new RFID sticker and they can be registered and tracked until you have time to do the data entry later. If the tubs have cameras, they might be able to take adequate photos of new objects, too, to help. If you link the system up with your friends and family, not only could you search to see if there's something you can borrow or lend to them, but you could see if you left anything behind at their place when they put it away.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Frustratingly, I can't seem to find anyone talking about this or any similar home organisation systems online.
PPS - I thought I saw a reference to one some time ago, but I can't find it.

Ninite

Ninite is a great tool for getting a lot of software up and running quickly. I've used it a few times recently. I see three problems with it, though. One, there's no way to tell what the installer is configured for before running it. Two, there no way to exclude or include programs once it's created. Three, it doesn't have a huge range of software in its library. If you want a new program in your Ninite installer, you have to go back to ninite.com, tick everything you had in the last one and anything new you want. If it changes again, you need another new installer which, as mentioned above, will give no indication what is inside it until it's running. I like Ninite as a quick start for a new system, or as a multi-update tool, but the best way I can see to use it is to go to the website every time, get a new installer and then discard it after it's done. And even when you do, you'll have to go elsewhere for some of your other software.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's good that it avoids bundled toolbars and things.
PPS - And it's quick and painless, too, so there's that.

Money always seems to flow uphill

If most money is flowing from poor to rich, then most people are becoming poorer. Where does it end? My best guesses are dying in poverty, neo-slavery or revolution. Or massive financial collapse followed by economic reboot. That scenario probably ends up with the formerly-rich owning more land, goods and companies than ever before, just because they know how to take advantage of those situations. The only rich who would suffer much through the destruction of a whole currency are those with mainly virtual assets: the entire financial sector. Anyone who owns buildings, land, companies and in-demand goods would probably come out of it just fine, though they might suffer a bit in the short term.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - "Suffer" is, of course, a relative term.
PPS - As are "rich" and "poor".

Mars One colonisation show directorial challenges

What are the Mars One team going to do to spice up the reality show funding the trip if it turns out to be rubbish? The way they normally cast reality shows like this is to put the loudest, most obnoxious, most insane people they can find in a tiny house and point the cameras at the carnage. When you put that same type of "TV-interesting" person in a tin can and fire them at another planet, waving goodbye forever, my bet is that exactly one of them arrives intact, smeared with the blood of his former crewmates, wearing their ears as a necklace. If you cast the reliable scientists who will get along and get the job done, by gum, then you'll have the most boring geology-focused reality show ever. So the best bet is probably to play it down the middle, choosing folk who are not completely crazy-town, but not mayonnaise-and-golf boring either.

Next problem. Sooner or later, someone is going to die on Mars, and that is a major bummer. Despite what all other TV has taught us, I don't think death would spice this one up. Instead, it would remind us of the mortality of all of our chosen reality-TV-nauts and we may cut ourselves off to save the pain.

One day, the ratings will slip. I mean, "Day 400 on Mars. Found some more red rocks." is not going to cut it. What do you do, then, as a producer of the show? Command someone to do something to spice things up? How? You are limited to asking politely from millions of kilometres away or sending a refresher crew to introduce something unknown. That's my guess. Once the ratings pay off, "season 2" is crew 2, on the way to Mars to expand the colony. Or, more likely, to form a separate faction and go to war with the old guard, because, seriously, screw those guys.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There has to be a self-sustaining tipping point we aim to reach.
PPS - At least before "Europa One" takes off.

Self esteem vs lovability

The modern cult of self esteem fails to answer the question: why am I valuable? Why am I significant? Why do I matter? We aim to raise children (and adults) who love themselves because it's the right thing to do, not because they are lovable in any way.

Try to be lovable. It will work out so much better.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't know if I'm lovable.
PPS - I guess the test should be how many people love you. I haven't counted.

Origami envelope for holding small objects

There's a standard way to fold an envelope out of an A4 sheet of paper. It looks quite neat and stylish, too, with two alternate corners bevelled. The problem, for some purposes, is that you can't use it to hold small objects, because it's wide open from a big slit at the back. If you were hoping to put a key or some coins in there, it just doesn't work. This is more suited to a letter, where all it has to hold in is ink.

To hold small objects, you can follow the same instructions, but with one extra step in advance. Before following the instructions above, fold the paper in half - just like the first step - but then follow the instructions from the beginning with the doubled paper. You'll get a smaller envelope, but you can open it up, put small items in the middle, then re-fold it. Your items will remain in place.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I used this just recently for some coins.
PPS - That's also how I discovered the flaw in the original design.

Efficiency in the face of overwhelming volume

There can come a point in any inbox/process/outbox system, such as email, when the volume coming in simply outpaces your processing capacity. I call it the "firehose point". When you simply get too much email to handle, what can you do? It's not a matter of "time management" at that point, nor of getting more efficient at handling individual emails, because any time management or email handling strategy you employ can be overwhelmed again by more volume. I mean the point when, no matter how quickly you handle any item - even to delete it - by the time you're done, at least two more have arrived.

The only possible response at that point is to accept that you will never see everything. Some people handle holiday email with a kind of declaration of bankruptcy: select all, delete, rely on second-notices if it's important. People do the same on social media, only reading the most recent items. It's an acceptable strategy, in its way, but you really should only apply it to situations where it doesn't matter if you're uninformed.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course, if you happen to miss the second notices, too, you've got bigger problems.
PPS - Assuming you have real responsibilities managed this way, that is.

Writing and rewriting

Lately I've been trying and failing to write a longer version of a flash story that I finished over a year ago. The basic idea was that a guy got addicted to building little worlds in magical bowls and playing God with them. In the flash version, he is telling his story to a support group, called Worldbuilders Anonymous. Even though it was a small scene, I felt it could be more show, less tell if it were longer, so I set out to do that. It dragged on and had a lot of little scenes that worked well on their own, but I realised that instead of writing one flash story, now I had several and no real glue between them. So I replotted and came up with a different outline as a longer story ... but I haven't been able to finish that one either. It hasn't been a great week for writing.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Actually, I think I've been working on this a lot longer than that.
PPS - It feels like a very long time.

Seven virtues

You don't hear as much about the Seven Virtues as you do about the Seven Deadly Sins. It's probably because the virtues are rather passive or long-term. Chastity, Diligence, Charity, Temperence, Patience, Humility and Kindness are much harder for us to characterise than Pride, Wrath, Greed, Sloth, Envy, Lust and Gluttony.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It just doesn't work as a Se7en sequel, is what I'm saying.
PPS - Not much does, though. That's probably why there never was a sequel.

Will the real Sherlock Holmes please stand up?

How many TV shows are essentially Sherlock Holmes? Obviously there's Sherlock and Elementary, which are fairly direct modern adaptations, and House, too, but there's also Monk and Psych, both of whose main characters fit the "hyper-observant eccentric" mould very well. Shawn Spencer on Psych even has a sidekick with a medical background, albeit in pharmaceutical sales rather than actual medical training. On Castle we do have an eccentric civilian consultant, but he's not hyper-observant, so I wouldn't necessarily count that. On Bones, the eccentric and the doctor character are the same person, and her powers of observation and deduction are fairly narrowly focused on anthropology, but you could make a case for Temperance Brennan being a type of Sherlock Holmes, too.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - When you start looking into it, those particular character traits show up quite often.
PPS - Especially on shows with single-word titles.

Crème fraîche

It bothers me, because I'm not really a foodie, that "crème fraîche" means "fresh cream" when translated literally, but really means a specific type of cream, soured with a bacterial culture. Then, of course, in France, "crème fraîche" actually does just mean "fresh cream", because the world is a deeply confusing place.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've been watching Masterchef.
PPS - There are few other ways crème fraîche could insert itself into my consciousness.

Netflix vs Comcast

The Netflix/Comcast agreement demonstrates that Net Neutrality is not a case of poor, overworked, underpaid ISPs finally getting their due from freeloading content providers. It's a hostage situation or a protection racket. "Pay up, or else all your lovely bandwidth could have a nasty accident". This is bandwidth, by the way, that everyone has already been paid for once. Netflix already pays its ISP to provide a service, and Comcast customers already pay Comcast and Netflix for the bandwidth and service, respectively. The only reason Netflix had to pay Comcast again is that Comcast has the power to kill Netflix traffic. That's not a normal commercial agreement. It's extortion.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - At least, for their part, Comcast seems to have used the extortion money to make Netflix faster.
PPS - It just shouldn't have been Netflix that had to pay for it.

Hulu and VPN

Hulu recently blocked paying customers who are accessing the service internationally via VPN software. This seems like a particularly vindictive move, but, really, Hulu doesn't want to cut off their international customers. Someone forced them. No company says "we're making some money from overseas customers. Is there a way we can do less of that?" So it's pretty clear to me that this wasn't their idea. It wasn't their idea to geo-block international users in the first place.

So who wants Hulu to be far less useful to international customers? The same entertainment companies that have archaic distribution agreements for different world regions, and also refuse to pay much attention to those non-USA regions.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - As soon as no entertainment can leave the United States, they'll be happy.
PPS - I mean no entertainment, ever, in any form. Zero exports. That's the win condition, apparently.

SixthSense vs Google Glass

In 2009, Pranav Mistry demonstrated some technology he called SixthSense, a wearable, gesture-controlled computer system whose visual output was a surface-mapped projector, allowing you to turn any surface into a computer or interact with the world as naturally as before, but now with seamless access to networked info everywhere. It was incredible. It was also a little bit awkward, worn around the neck on a lanyard. Though the software was released, the project has stalled. People can't build it.

In 2012, Google demonstrated Google Glass, their wearable computer. It is limited to a tiny display in one eye, though, and has to be controlled through voice and swipe gestures. However, with its front-facing camera, it could easily pick up on SixthSense gestures. Swapping the inward-facing eye display for an outward-facing projector, you could have a platform to run SixthSense, assuming the software issues could be overcome.

So we're still a few steps away from that world, but I think we're going to get there. In a way, it makes me mad that we don't have this yet, since Mistry was so close. He had devices, he had the software, now the software is released, but the devices aren't available, the software doesn't build any more and Mistry doesn't have time to work on it because he's busy with other projects.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It doesn't have to be SixthSense. A similar project would do.
PPS - It's just that a lot of the work is already done for SixthSense itself. It would be a shame to waste it.

Browser security just got a lot worse

A massive security vulnerability is being introduced to the Firefox web browser by Mozilla, on purpose, and it is to remain there for the forseeable future.

Mozilla is adding closed-source DRM to their otherwise open-source web browser, Firefox. Nobody in the world is happy about this except for a few media CEOs that we should still be able to push around. Now here's the worst part. Because of the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause, it is illegal to tell people about security vulnerabilities in DRM systems. Responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities is the only thing keeping your software up to date and virus-free. Since one of those closed systems is getting into your web browser and nobody is allowed to tell anybody about security vulnerabilities, it is no longer safe to do anything secure online. These DRM systems will have security vulnerabilities, and they must be kept secret, which means that only the people who discover them will know about them, they will never get fixed, and they will be used to steal your credit card numbers when you are online. Believe it. The internet just got a lot less safe so that Netflix could hallucinate that they are finally safe from piracy.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Don't worry, it's not just Firefox. All browsers will be getting DRM soon, to protect themselves from you.
PPS - And, of course, making themselves far more vulnerable to malware and identity theft in the process.

Personal storage and couriers

Seen at BoingBoing, there's a startup called MakeSpace that combines small personal storage (in units of Big Plastic Tubs) with on-demand delivery to and from wherever you are. It still costs a fair bit for delivery, though, because they're essentially offering a courier service on top of storage.

This is a business that I think will take off when flying drones take over from couriers and the post office, because it can let you rent as much or as little storage space as you need for your stuff and still get to it quickly and easily, wherever you are and at whatever time of day. If that kind of storage is quick, cheap and convenient, imagine how the world would change. Parents could keep their kids' Christmas presents out of the house and have them delivered back at the last minute on Christmas Eve (provided enough drone capacity in the system). Shoppers could wander around the city, send their purchases into storage and keep shopping, without the need to carry a lot of bags around. You can have your stuff moved between cities or suburbs automatically and never care where, specifically, it is stored, as long as it can come to you quickly. You can list it for sale online and collect payment from your buyer without the physical box even needing to move, because the tub can just be reassigned to a different owner account.

It will also save the storage industry money because they can use whatever space they need, wherever they can find it, rather than needing large, car-accessible facilities with individual lock-up doors. They can just get one big warehouse with tall shelves wherever is convenient and save the larger facilities for items that won't fit in the tubs.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Security is obviously still an issue, though.
PPS - Especially in transit.

Cameras aren't safety

A camera isn't safety. A camera will just tell the jury who murdered you after the fact, assuming the lighting and angle are right, that he's not wearing a mask and that his face is easy to find in some database without any possibility of false matches. Actual camera safety means a vigilant person watching with a very quick response team ready to come and help you. They don't actually do that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - They can't afford people to actually watch what the cameras see.
PPS - That's why they got the cameras in the first place.

Dictation software for spelling

When you have no clue how to spell a word, dictation software might help. If your pronunciation is clear, you can ask your phone how to spell a word by asking it to take a note or run a search. I wonder if that's a Google Now command? It would make sense.

The only trouble is when your pronunciation is also uncertain. If you're looking to spell "deteriorate", it won't do any good if you ask "OK, Google, how do you spell deteriate?" A machine might, with some clever programming, be able to suggest a word that sounds kind of similar to what you've said, but it won't necessarily be as good as a human at inferring the word you want to spell.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The usual caveats with dictation software apply.
PPS - Such as being unable to use it in quiet places or fearing looking weird.

Katy Perry pranks birthdays

I realise this was a little while ago now, but I love that Katy Perry went to some kid's birthday party and made their day with the surprise. You can see in the video for Birthday that these kids thought it was the best thing ever. What is less obviously fun is the (deliberately) terrible face painting she did before taking off her disguise. It's also not clear from the video whether she unmasked herself at the other four birthday parties she attended as various terrible entertainers. If she didn't, then the joke isn't "I pretended to be a terrible party entertainer but I'm really Katy Perry". It's more like "I was an actual terrible party entertainer and then I left", which is less of a joke and more a way to ruin a party for no reason. The only way to "pretend" to be a terrible entertainer is to be a terrible entertainer.

I sincerely hope that, after some awful "entertaining", she took off her disguise at every party and performed as herself for everyone. It might not fully make up for some parts, such as the staged car crash (at one of the parties) that upset several kids and parents, but "Katy Perry staged a car crash at my birthday party" is a more positive story than "Some horrible clown ruined my party and there was a car crash, too". Pranks rarely have positive outcomes for the recipient. It's important to keep that in mind when planning one, because only the prankster and anyone in on the joke end up laughing.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That said, when Katy Perry gets a real movie role, I'm going to see it.
PPS - Besides "Part of Me", that is. And those one-episode roles in How I Met Your Mother and Raising Hope. And her voice work in The Smurfs.

Hollywood should embrace crowdfunding

For any movie that Hollywood is afraid to fund themselves, they should use crowdsourced funding. Can't bring yourself to back a Wonder Woman or Black Widow movie? Ask the fans for the cash. Let them pre-pay their cinema ticket price or DVD purchase price and see if the idea has legs. Then, when you drown in all the money, just go ahead and make the movies, would you? Please?

Seriously, someone needs to start a whole movie studio based on the crowdfunding model. Imagine their website as just a list of potential projects, the required budget and the current funding level. Even the backer rewards would be pretty simple to set up. Cinema tickets, DVD/Blu-Ray discs, posters, autographed portraits of the stars or maybe, at very high investment levels, a share in the profits. It would look like any online shopping cart system, except either you don't get charged right away or the money goes into escrow until funding targets are met or the funding deadline falls through. Veronica Mars proved that crowdfunding works to make movies, but also that the existing movie studios are terrible at thinking of their customers as investors instead of wallets attached to eyeballs.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The old guard are still pulling record profits, though.
PPS - So maybe their way is working well enough for now.

Data is just the first step to control

Step one in any diet or budget plan is "pay attention". Write down everything you eat or everything you spend. Whatever you're trying to control, you need to track it. But tracking is not enough. You can't just track what you're eating and hope for the best. That collected data is just a step. To make progress, you need a plan. You need to set limits on what you spend, and bring the pain of spending off your budget closer to the enjoyment of the moment. When you spend from a credit card, the pain comes at the end of the month, and until then, you have the pleasure of the purchase. To change your habits, it helps to make that pain immediate at the point of purchase. You need to see your balance whenever you contemplate a purchase.

This is where mobile apps can help. Imagine that all of your purchases went through an app that also monitors your budget. You have $100 you are allowed to spend on groceries this week, and when you get to the checkout, that number comes up and your purchases are deducted from it. You see imediately the bite you have taken from your budget. EFTPOS doesn't show your balance on the machine, for good reason, so this would be a step up.

But maybe that's not immediate enough. You might fill your trolley and only realise you've made a mistake at the checkout. What you need, then, is a budget app that helps you track a trolley of shopping as you stack it up. Then every time you pick something off the shelf, it comes off the budget. You'll see the damage you're doing that very second. That's real immediate pain at the point of the decision.

For dieting, this is not so easy. A daily weigh-in isn't enough. You need to see your projected weight gain with every bite you put in your mouth. Perhaps something like Google Glass connected to pressure sensors in your shoes. Every time you stand still you'd see your current weight. If you eat standing up, you'd see the number going up the whole time. That's bound to make you think.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Though, as demonstrated by the faults with BMI, weight is not quite the right thing to measure.
PPS - I'm sure we could arrange a belt to measure your waist at all times.

Capitalist environmentalism

The capitalist solution to industrial pollution is to sell the polluted environment and therefore make it somebody's economic problem to stop the pollution. The problem is that the polluting company can just buy the river (for instance) and dump their effluent into it and be legally within their rights. It's their river and their factory, so they can put their waste in it. There is private responsibility for common property, then, but a conflict of interest.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't think anyone is consciously attempting this.
PPS - Yet.

Microsoft innovation

Microsoft's best "innovation" comes from panicked reactions to industry trends. People started installing Linux on tiny laptops that were too underpowered for Windows Vista, so we got Windows 7 with performance improvements. People started buying tablets instead of "real" computers, so we got Windows 8 and the Surface, designed for touch. Desktop users hated the Windows 8 tiled Start screen and mostly didn't have touch screen hardware, so we got Windows 8.1 Update that brings back a "classic" desktop look for mouse-and-keyboard users.

The lesson is, if you want something better from Microsoft, don't complain, just launch a product that starts to siphon away their revenue.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There may be more, given that this is a simplification.
PPS - It does feel this way, though.

Maybe I'll switch to Twitter

I'm considering moving away from Blogger to Twitter. I know they're not the same kind of thing, and I know they don't provide the same level of expression, but that's kind of the point. I'd like to learn to express my ideas more succinctly, and 140 characters is just the way to do that. I might set up an IFTTT recipe to post my tweets to Blogger, but that seems like a waste.

I always thought I'd keep blogging until I ran out of ideas to share. I didn't consider that, perhaps, I would run out of worthwhile ideas to share, then not really notice for a few months. That time may have come.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - At least for this week, I'm going to do both.
PPS - I'll let you know how it goes.

Single-beneficiary charities

When I hear about a charity set up to benefit exactly one person, I'm kind of conflicted. I appreciate that people have needs that aren't always met, and that charity is a good way to support those people, but it seems to me that a charity focusing on one solitary person might be too narrow. What happens if you are spectacularly successful at raising money to support yourself via charity, so that your new means far exceed your needs? I don't know how most of these super-focused charities handle that, but I expect some people would just say that's their good luck balancing the bad, and keep it. Some would hoard it just in case, for example, there's a relapse of cancer and more support is needed. The only ones I could respect would give it away to others in similar situations.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not sure how I would handle it, though.
PPS - I mean, for example, how can you tell in advance how much cancer treatment you'll need?

The roach motel content sharing model

The "walled garden" is the online model of the old days of AOL and Compuserve, back when your ISP tried to run every service you would ever need, without any external interaction. That's not how we do it these days, because that model, rightly, failed. These days we have a different kind of walled garden, which I call the "roach motel". Content checks in, but doesn't check out.

Think of Facebook. It is possible to pull in anything from any other website to share on Facebook. Videos, pictures, articles, you name it. What you can't do, however, is take what you saw embedded on Facebook and share it elsewhere. That's what every big service online wants to be these days. The gravity well towards which everything online flows. All roads lead to Rome, hail Caesar Zuckerberg.

My concern is that it seems to be working so far. I can't see the catastrophic failure at the end of the rainbow, and that bothers me. One day, you see, Facebook will go away, one way or another. If it is where we kept everything, then everything will disappear.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The only possible end I can imagine is a competitor just as big, stealing all the users.
PPS - That's not so much an end as a transition, and a very unlikely one.

Showbiz jealousy is a natural byproduct

I think jealousy in show business is a direct result of the that there are only so many jobs to go around. If someone else gets more attention, they get the gigs and you don't. Those circumstances are exactly what you'd set up if you wanted to turn someone into an attention-seeking jealous monster, because now that's practically their job description.

Can we regain the human goodness in those circumstances? Can we have "show friendliness" rather than "show business"? Probably not, as long as there is limited money to go around, and money is always limited, one way or another.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I couldn't make a living in Hollywood.
PPS - I'd love to act, but I wouldn't handle being a celebrity.

Founding expectations

People expect you, in certain professions, around your forties, to found a company of your own. I think the only reason I would ever found a software company would be if it were less stressful than being an employee, and I don't see that happening. I don't want to be a manager. I don't want to hire and fire people, work for sales, kowtow to demanding clients, or publish a vision and mission statement. I'm fiercely disinterested in all of that. I just want to write software. If I could found a company that let me ignore all of that stuff and focus even more on writing the software I want to write, that would be my dream.

About the only way I can see it working is if I'm a one-man software shop. I might just need to call in consultants occasionally for sales, accounts and management direction.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This assumes I have a product to sell.
PPS - Which, right now, I don't.

JavaScript

I don't deny that people have done some stellar work and put in heroic efforts to bring rich functionality and interaction to JavaScript, turning it into a relatively powerful language. My only observation in response is to say that no such extensions and enhancements were needed for any other modern language. They started that way. JavaScript, to me, feels like a horse cart, but now with neon lights, alloy wheels and a huge spoiler. It's trying to race with the big boys but, ultimately, it's still a horse cart in a V8 world. It was designed for much less than it is trying to do, and we are only using it because a generation of programmers decided that desktop environments and deployment was too hard.

We should think of JavaScript the same way we thought of Assembly language after the C compiler came along.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Finding an alternative JavaScript is not the point.
PPS - We need compilers that output JavaScript.

Shareware vs web servers

Before (the widespread consumer use of) the internet, we had "shareware". This was software that you were encouraged to copy from person to person, try out, and pay the owner (on the honour system) if you kept using it. Thinking about it now, that has some elements of P2P filesharing, though the payment system was obviously the only thing that worked at the time for non-traditionally-published software. These self-published software developers treated software copying as word-of-mouth advertising and, because they couldn't rely on an internet connection, the only measures they could try to take against non-paying customers was to try and make the software only function for a certain time, or only distribute a functionally limited version. This is the software environment I grew up in. Mail-order software as advertising for honour-system payments. No wonder I'm so different to today's always-on webserver thinkers.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I need to work on that.
PPS - It's not that I can't think that way, it's just not my default setting.

Git

I've had to learn to use Git, which is the most popular distributed version control system in the software world. I was quite happy with Bazaar, a different version control system, because it fit very well with the way I worked on my own, whereas Git was designed primarily to be fast for thousands of developers working in very distributed teams over the internet. None of that describes how I work, but I've been outvoted by the world.

The biggest problem I encountered while learning was the "working over the internet" part. Every tutorial and every third-party tool I tried always reached a point where it began assuming I was working from a remote server, complicating matters and failing to teach me what I needed to know. It was a very frustrating situation to be in, because I'm trying to accomplish very simple goals - well within the software's capabilities - but it's already been presumed that complex dealings with remote servers are the norm. This seems especially galling to me, because Git is distributed, and should have no need of a server, but the first thing people do with it is say "Yeah, but how do I put it on a central server?"

I've successfully imported all of my Bazaar history into Git repositories, though, so at least that part went well.

Git works, especially for what it was designed for. That's part of why it's become the de-facto industry standard for distributed version control, even if most people use it in a heavily centralised mode. Compared to Bazaar, I like how easy merges are to perform. In Bazaar, there were more conflicts when merging. In Git, merging is relatively simple and quite often conflict-free. More conflicts are resolved automatically, anyway. That's pretty good. It's also the part that took me the longest to learn.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm happy enough that I made the switch.
PPS - I'm not as happy that it wasn't entirely my choice.

Buying petrol discounts

If you have to spend $5 in store to get a 4c/L discount on petrol, then you'd better be buying more than 125L of petrol, or else you just got screwed. For example, if your petrol was priced at $1.40 per litre and you filled up with 40 litres, that's a total cost of $56. If you buy $5 worth of chocolates to get the 4c discount, then your petrol is $1.36 per litre and your total cost is $59.40, or $3.40 more than you would have paid without getting the "discount". It's only when 4c per litre adds up to $5 that this becomes worthwhile. $5 divided by 4c/L gives 125 litres.

If you buy items you would have bought anyway, but at the higher petrol station prices, the calculation is more complicated. You only have to count the extra dollars you paid over supermarket prices for milk and bread and convert that into litres. Let's say you buy milk to get your discount, because you are running low at home. You pay $5 for 3L of milk but you would have paid $3 at the supermarket. That's an extra $2 you paid to get your petrol discounted by 4c/L. For that to be worthwhile, divide your $2 by the 4c/L discount and you need to be buying 50L of petrol to hit the break-even point. It's more plausible, but for me, personally, my car only has a 40L tank, so it is never worthwhile for me to spend $5 at the petrol station to get a 4c/L discount, even if it's something I already need.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Dollars spent for the discount (D) = cents per litre discount (c) times litres bought (L).
PPS - Plug in the two numbers you know and solve for the remaining one to find out whether it's worthwhile.

Phone space used by Pocket

I started using Pocket for offline reading on my phone when Instapaper stopped being useful enough. I used to delete articles when I was done, just because the alternative was archiving, and I just didn't see the need for an archive of my read articles. Also, I assumed that Pocket was going to keep that archive to make a profile and sell my data. I still assume they're doing that, but I started using the archive for one very simple reason: it was faster. Archiving an item is one click, deleting is two, because every delete has an "are you sure?" confirmation question. So my archive started building up. Now I'll have to start deleting articles again because, it seems, Pocket stores the archive on my phone, taking up extra space. I currently have 2.2GB - that's 20% of my phone's available storage - taken up with Pocket's cache of article images from Cracked.com alone. There's more than 3GB total, and a good chunk of that will be the archive (assuming my theory is correct). The archive has to go, which should release some space. I'm not sure how much. If I want to release the maximum amount of space that I can, right away, I need to find, read and remove any articles that contain animated GIFs. They are by far the biggest images stored by Pocket which, unfortunately, can't display animated GIFs anyway. Starting this week, I will be aiming to destroy my Pocket archive, because that will save space on my phone and prevent it from being used as a marketing tool against me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I used an app called DiskUsage to figure this out.
PPS - It works pretty well.

An update on the universal playlist

I've been keeping all of my entertainment in one big playlist for a little while now, allowing me to focus on books, movies, podcasts or TV shows that seem most important to me at the time. I vote for them against each other, deciding which of two items I would most like to be doing at that time. When a few rounds of voting are done, some clear winners emerge, and it's much easier to choose something fun from that smaller list. Incidentally, this is also how I choose which blog posts to make here, out of the huge backlog I have in storage.

The first observation is that, because of the way the list works, new items don't get voted down immediately. They don't have to fight for position against the top performers. This means new items actually have an advantage over older ones that already got voted down. I will often get something brand new come to the top of the list despite only having added it the day before. This is a bit against the ideal I set out to embody with the list, but I don't think it's been too big a deal yet. We'll see.

The second observation is that I really don't have as much time as I thought. I'm not getting through any more entertainment than I used to. I'm just getting more variety and more quality. It's good, but the list does continue to grow. As I write, I have over 400 items on the list. As I add more, they're not going to go away more quickly. It is likely that this list will continue to grow longer as long as I use it, unless I look at the tail end and decide there are some items I will never need to bother with at all. Those I can cut out.

It's funny how the size of the list still plays on my mind. I know I don't have to get it all done. That's why I use it in the first place. If I can't do everything, I'd better do what's important or most fun. Perhaps this means I just haven't accepted my own mortality.

Sometimes the voting is hard. Two items that I'd really like to do come up against each other, just at random, and I have to choose between them. Or two really bad ones. That's just as difficult.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - On the whole, though, it's working pretty well.
PPS - I've changed software once since I started. I wrote both myself.

Facebook doesn't do news well

For me, at least lately, Facebook is a terrible way to get official news. It's buried under cat videos and Candy Crush invitations and I'll often skim right over special-interest news I would otherwise very much like to read. For companies looking to get the word out, Facebook is terrible in a different way. When you post something to your company Facebook page, it only goes out to 5% of your followers - people who have deliberately sought you out and linked their profile to your page because they want news from you. Apparently, if you pay Facebook a gatekeeper tax, they'll bump that number up to 10%. So, basically, Facebook is terrible as an official news channel.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm also not on Facebook every day, so I miss news that way, too.
PPS - And I don't always read my whole news feed when I'm there.

Faith in large primes

I saw Adam Spencer give basically this same talk at Tech Ed 2011 in Queensland. He talks about prime numbers, the ongoing search for larger primes, the discovery of Mersenne primes and one particular number, known as M48, that is simply too large to show on a slide, let alone to comprehend its massiveness.
Because it has been proven prime, and it being the largest known prime so far discovered, Adam says that he knows, with the same deep-down certainty as he knows anything else, that this number is prime - it has no factors but 1 and itself.

The thing is, what he's talking about isn't knowledge as such. Rather, he has faith that this number is prime. He has faith in the computers and software that performed the proof. He has faith in the people who created that hardware and that software - that they did not make mistakes in creating them, nor in running them. That no unforseen errors occurred and were accidentally buried. That no deliberate fraud was committed in order to claim the title of the discoverer of M48 (though I'm also pretty sure that's not the case). Because unless he performed these calculations himself, Adam cannot really know that M48 is prime. He is trusting that judgment to others. Trust and faith in maths too big to do for himself. That's what Adam has. It might not seem like a significant distinction, but it makes a significant difference when discussing science.

I don't, personally, know any forensic science, archaeology, anthropology or molecular biology. I trust my understanding of those topics to trained people or, more accurately, to popular journalism of those topics, filtered through all the news channels and brains that stand between me and the scientists doing that work. There are a lot of layers to trust there - a lot of translation and assumptions of honesty or even just accuracy. The point is, a lot of what you "know" about science is based on faith in a lot of people doing their jobs honestly and accurately. That is trust or faith, but it is not knowledge.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Faith that computer hardware works as designed is pretty well-founded these days.
PPS - There are plenty of places where the story could go wrong, though.

Browser security

When websites are more like apps, we need to be able to grant or deny permissions to them like we do any other software. A firewall or whitelist that allows or denies code full permissions based on its origin is too coarse, and most people aren't even doing that much with their desktops, let alone their browsers. Browser security is probably the next big battleground.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Actually, it's probably the big current battleground.
PPS - It is, after all, the biggest sector of computer use right now.

Clock vs timepiece

I learned something recently. In a couple of TV shows I've watched - specifically Heroes and Grimm - there is a character who works with clocks, though they are careful to use the term "timepiece". I thought this was just weird professional terminology pedantry, but then I read the Wikipedia article on clocks. It turns out that the word "clock" is derived from a word that means "bell", so a device that tells time but has no bells has a different name, "timepiece". So that's why your wristwatch or cheap wall clock is technically a timepiece. It also means that the name "Big Ben" for the Clock Tower in London is slightly more accurate than you might think after hearing that bit of trivia that Big Ben is actually the bell, not the tower.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This also might make sense of the word "glockenspiel".
PPS - Though maybe not.

Criticising art

The only valid way to criticise someone's art is to make better art. You're not allowed to just say "that sucks", and you're definitely not allowed to say "that sucks and you should stop making art forever". If you want to say some artwork is bad, whether painting, drawing, writing, acting, film-making, music, whatever, then your only recourse is to make something better.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If your retort is "but I can't", then you're making my point.
PPS - The world has enough critics and not enough artists.

Rating quality by true or false questions

Games, movies and books tend to be rated on a 1-10 scale, 7 being the lowest and 9 being the highest, as they say. Or 1-5 stars, which is pretty much the same. As a game reviewer, I've heard, you can expect a hard fight to get anything outside that 7-9 range published as your official score, if you work for a major outlet. If you don't work for a big publisher, then obviously you do what you like, so this post doesn't apply to you.

This 1-10 or star-rating scale is heavily skewed to the top end, is what I'm saying, and it's hard to decide what it means. Is an "8" game always better than a "7"? Probably not, if they're in different genres and you prefer one genre over another. It all depends on the reviewer's taste, their mood on the day, the rest of the audience (for movies or live shows) and so on. Some publications try to get around this "all in one" score by rating individual aspects for their reviews. For games, it might be "music", "sound", "graphics", "gameplay" and whatever else. For movies it would include "plot", "script", "performances" ... you get the idea. It's slightly more helpful, but still not objective.

I think it would be instructive to try a binary categorised rating system. For a set of aspects of the work, the reviewer answers "yes" or "no" and that's it. "Was the music enjoyable?", "Was the plot free of gaping holes?", "Did the movie/book/game feel too long?" Things like that. Now we have a way to break down enjoyment of a work and give it an honest score percentage (depending on how many "good" boxes it ticked). No mucking about saying "Well, I thought the music might have been a 3, maybe 3.5 stars, but I said that about that other movie last week, and this was better than that. Better make it 4". Just "Yes, music was good". It's still subjective, but it's harder to lie to yourself and worm around your answers if they're "yes/no" questions. Hopefully, if you ask the right questions, preferably across a broad sample of people, you'll get a representative rating, plus a solid data set to back it up.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If you ask the right questions, this could work for a lot of situations.
PPS - And if you match answers with a user profile, the ratings can reflect the taste of individual readers.

Pegging the creepiness meter

I read recently about a way to sort-of-quantify creepiness. I thought I'd plug in my own self-assessment to the formula and see where I come out. The entire argument is kind of moot anyway, because I'm going on 7 years married now, but it's fun to see. I'm going to go with a star rating, 1-5, on the formula components to come out with a number at the end that's very difficult to interpret and almost totally context-free. Well, the four factors I need to assess for myself to use the formula are:

Awkwardness: High. I'm so awkward I'd rather lose contact than risk saying something stupid. 5.
Forwardness: I am not forward until I know you, and even then it's maybe once per year. Still, I'm not a total shut-in. Rating 2.
Attractiveness: Grading from "lice-bearded hobo" at 1 and "airbrushed supermodel" at 5, I'd rate myself a middling 3.
Persistence: Hmm. I am actually difficult to discourage, I suppose. I'd like to think I am going to back off if you are taken, but in all honesty, I'm likely to carry a torch for a while after that. 4? Go with 4.

The creepiness formula is:
Creepiness = ( (Awkwardness x Forwardness) / (Attractiveness) )^Persistence

In my case, then, that's: (( 5 x 2 ) / 3 ) ^ 4 = 123.45

Wow. That seems really high. How about we compare my score to a confident, go-get-'em jock who, nevertheless, takes "no" for an answer:
(( 1 x 5 ) / 4 ) ^ 1 = 1.25

So, compared to the "ideal" I've just invented, I'm creepier by about a factor of 100. Yikes. Well, that makes sense of my entire (lack of) high-school dating history.

So what adjustments can I make to lower my score? Step 1 should probably be to dial down the persistence. Don't be immediately discouraged, but take a hint (also, learn to read hints). Forwardness needs to go down, too. I can't affect my attractiveness enough to significantly swing the number up, and I can probably only affect my awkwardness for the better with a long process of confrontation therapy. Looking at the formula, it's probably worth it. New predicted result:
(( 3 x 1 ) / 3 ) ^ 2 = 1. Better than the jock. That's because, with these new scores, my awkwardness x forwardness score is the same as my attractiveness, which actually means persistence has no effect. I guess that's good.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The worst-case value for this formula used this way is about 9.7 million.
PPS - I guess, by that standard, I'm doing pretty well.

Automated interpersonal package delivery

What I would very much like to set up is a private package delivery network between my family and friends. If I want to borrow a physical book from a friend, I would just text them the request and send a quadcopter drone to them. They put the book in a box and send it back. I wouldn't need to wait until I see them next or arrange a meeting to exchange physical goods. Just send the drone.

I think this would also be a very neat way to use self-storage. If you have some automation inside a storage locker, then you can access it from anywhere with drones. To put something away in storage, tell the drone what it's picking up (so you can retrieve it later), then just put it in the drone when it arrives. To get it back, look it up in your index (presumably on a mobile app that lets the drone find you) and tap "deliver". You could even throw things out from storage or have them all moved to another facility or a bigger locker without ever going there.

You know what drone delivery reminds me of most? The little parachute "gifts" from sponsors in The Hunger Games. They float down from some unspecified location in the sky right to where you are. Swap the parachute for four little helicopter rotors and that's exactly what I'm talking about.

Basically, drone delivery lets you be as disorganised with your physical stuff as you currently are with your real-life plans since mobile phones came along.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This does ignore security.
PPS - Now your possessions can be "Only a Drone-Call Away(TM)".

Awkward

This is being awkward: I am too afraid of making a fool of myself to ever cut loose and have some fun. I am so afraid of losing my friends that I will stay quiet, lest I offend them, and just let them drift away to more fun places. It's the quietest, lamest form of self-destruction I know, but it feels like cautious self-preservation at every step from "good friends" to "who are you again?"

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I want to work on this.
PPS - Step 1, research.

What backups should be

"Backed up" means lots of copies. That should be obvious. "Fireproof" means that those copies are in lots of physical locations. "Secured" means strongly encrypted with keys that nobody else knows. "Recoverable" means that those copies can be obtained and restored in the event of disaster. For your most valuable personal data, you should have at least fireproof, recoverable backups and, preferably, secure them.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You might be able to get away without securing your backups if they are merely personal, not sensitive.
PPS - You'd be surprised what counts as sensitive, though.

I need maps on all weather warnings

I need maps on every weather warning issued by the Bureau of Meteorology. I don't know, for instance, if I live inside the Calliope River catchment, so it's hard to tell if certain warnings apply to me. I can, however, locate my home and place of business on a map. Give me that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm fairly confident I don't live in the Calliope River catchment.
PPS - That's only because I don't know where the Calliope River is. Geography is not my strong suit.

Computer user self-esteem

Some people seem to have low computer self-esteem. Being shown around my new workplace, several people introduced themselves as being "in the remedial class", "hopeless" or "the one who causes the problems". I just wonder how we got to that point. Why should people blame themselves for computer problems? Probably because programmers and sysadmins have spent years blaming them.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You can stop blaming yourself now.
PPS - Well, maybe not for everything.

The source code of language

On a particular TED talk, an Ajit Narayan talked about his methods for teaching autistic children the structure of abstract language through the use of some concrete thought maps, and how those thought maps (which he called "Free Speech", not to be confused with the US Constitution's first amendment right) could be converted into grammatical speech in any language via fairly simple rules.

Being a software developer, this struck a particular chord with me, because that sounds like he has discovered the source code of language itself. His thought maps are the ideas we are trying to express, and the rule engine applied to them is the compiler of language. If you're looking to translate a document into many different languages, then, what you're doing is decompiling it into source code, which, for any language, involves a fair bit of nuanced understanding and reworking. If you succeed, though, you'll have a thought source document that can be compiled into any human language. If you are all for the preservation of languages, then these compiler engines are what you should be working on.

I'm sure there's a lot more complexity to the process than I'm getting, especially since the subtleties of language are many, but it is at least a good start. To include all human language subtleties, you would need to ask a lot of questions that aren't relevant for all target languages. In some cases, for instance, to talk about people's relatives, you may need to draw out a full family tree to illustrate the links, including ages, where, in English, the word "cousin" would cover all that detail. Also, technical vocabulary would be very complicated to convey. Unless there's an icon for "coeliac", how would you convey it in simple terms?

It sounds like the key to universal translators, the end of Babel, but picture this: people all have subtly different understandings of language itself. Not just dialects, but to the extent that my mental associations with the word "cat" might be very different to yours. All communication might be done via these thought maps, but what if every person maintained their own compiler engine for them? We would all be speaking slightly different versions of English, French, Spanish, Portugese, German, whatever, and they would drift further apart without interaction and correction. In the end, only the thought maps would make sense.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And maybe then our understanding of those would start to drift apart.
PPS - Hopefully not.

Kickstarter investor pain

The dream of sidestepping corporations via Kickstarter might be over. It might never have been realistic to begin with. Two recent events have led me to start thinking this way. There is, of course, the VR headset Oculus Rift being bought out by Facebook. There's also the Veronica Mars movie, whose backers were promised digital downloads and sorta-kinda got them, as long as they use Warner Bros crippled, horrible, device-limited DRM system. The promise of these Kickstarter projects wasn't just for the producers of these works, being able to get funding without needing to kowtow to big venture capitalists. The promise was also to the backers, that, when they put up the cash to make the project happen, they get the investor rewards.

That hasn't been happening. As soon as a project reaches commercial viability, big companies are swooping in and taking over. And, in a way, that's okay, I guess. It's the way business works in a capitalist economy. The problem, to me, is that the ones being paid aren't the backers.

I think Kickstarter might need to grow up a little bit here. Instead of offering different rewards at different levels of support, the campaigns may need to offer a buy-back price option. Once their business or product gets off the ground, they can start buying back shares from their supporters at a given percentage rate, low for low investors and higher for those that risked more. This isn't quite the way Kickstarter has worked so far, and it might be a bit of a big cultural shift in their operations, so it should also be possible to offer their more "traditional" rewards as a selectable option for the buy-back. You can have our revolutionary 3D printer as a reward, or we can buy back your $100 worth of shares in our company for $110.

This isn't the form of investing that everyday people are used to, though. The promise of a $10 reward six months down the track might not inspire them to put up the cash, but it probably wouldn't leave quite as sour a taste in their mouths as the buy-out/kick-teeth model that is taking over.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or maybe not. I'm not an expert on investor relations.
PPS - I'm not even an amateur or hobbyist. So, you know. Grain of salt, etc.

Squishy

I like the image of Chuck Wendig's "When Haters Give You Lemons" post, where he finishes his riff on the cliched saying with "Make haterade". It conjures up a little wordless scene where someone hands another person a hateful lemon. The recipient looks at it in his hand, looks up at the hater, with his hateful scowl, and squishes his head with a horrible squishy sound.

If I ever get hated on for making art - even art I know is bad - then I'm going to imagine that squishy sound.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Right now, I'm too obscure to be hated.
PPS - Which is actually kind of depressing.

How IMDb could make my life a bit easier

An app that would make my life so much easier would be photo face recognition for TV actors. A lot of my time watching TV seems to be spent looking up actors in IMDb and finding out where else we've seen them. The IMDb app is not really built for this. It's built to avoid overwhelming your screen and data connection by showing only the most relevant information for any given context that you happen to be viewing, but the path between the show we're watching and the full filmography of a particular extra on a particular episode is so long that and such a common operation for me that I frequently long for optimisation.

The path right now is:

IMDb -> search -> show name -> All episodes -> season -> episode -> All cast -> actor name -> All filmography -> [As] actor.

What I'd like is:

IMDb -> who's that (face recognition from camera) -> search results -> actor (all filmography displayed on same page).

Even better would be limiting the filmography to only what I've actually seen, but that would mean IMDb knowing everything I've seen. That would either be a creepy invasion of privacy or a lot of data entry. Or perhaps an import from Quickflix.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Quickflix doesn't know all about me, though.
PPS - I'm pretty sure I don't remember everything I've ever seen.

Unusable software doesn't mean it's complicated

There's a weird perversity in some circles of software development where difficulty of use is a point of pride. The twisted reasoning goes that, if you have mastered something that is very difficult, then you must be very good, and the task performed by that software must be exceptional too. The online support communities get quite snarky at newbies (presumably because the n00bs couldn't possibly understand what we geniuses are doing up here in the stratosphere) and nobody aims to make the software easier to use, not just because that sounds like "dumbing it down", but because they literally cannot imagine another way.

The problem is often that the biggest difficulty in the system is the badly designed software obscuring what should be a relatively simple task. Oracle database developers vs Microsoft SQL Server is an example I have seen in practice.

SQL Server is a robust, full-featured program that runs reliably and doesn't require constant hand-holding from developers. The online community is helpful and professional. Oracle is less stable, much more complicated to operate and operations that are simple in SQL Server require a lot of time and effort to accomplish in Oracle. The online community is elitist and hostile, in general, though there are some helpful people too.

Why should this be the case? Both programs are database servers. Both do essentially the same thing, but one does it better in terms of usability, and that seems to follow through to the community online.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My experience with Oracle is second-hand, but I trust my colleague.
PPS - I used to think the same way as those snarky, unhelpful ones. I've changed my mind.

Specialised currencies and revoking value

When you pre-pay for phone call credit, you are really just releasing some funds to your phone company to use. The same is true of my public transport card and store gift cards. This is what makes it all the more infuriating, to me, when companies decide that you've had long enough to use that money and confiscate it. This is routine policy in all the examples I've noted above. So what gives companies the right to take your money for the crime of taking too long to spend it? I think there's something deeply wrong there.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't have a pre-paid phone, but I've had store gift cards expire.
PPS - That really should mean "refunded".

Optimisation

Optimisation will never lead to real breakthroughs, only incrementally better or more focused versions of what you have now.

If you look at your sales data and see that most of your customers are male, then you start designing for men, you might sell more or better to those men, but you're going to miss the opportunities to think of new products that women want, or that everyone wants.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - To make real breakthroughs, you need to look at the situation fresh.
PPS - Don't optimise before you're finished.

Australian privacy laws and information security

With the new privacy laws in Australia, companies that deal with confidential data, such as my current employer, will need to take some extraordinary measures to try and control what data is copied externally. For instance, any flash drive plugged into a computer will need to be an encrypted, pre-approved device. This raises a few questions and problems. For starters, how do you even enforce a policy like that? It will have to be done at a system level, rather than an external guideline, or else we are not meeting our requirements. I don't think Windows has any way to do that, though I wouldn't know for sure. And if it does, how do you make sure that nobody can get around it? The control would have to be at a very low level, or else people will be able to bring in a live Linux drive, plug that in and work around all the security you set up in Windows. And if there's a security vulnerability discovered in the encryption software you use, which there may be, how do you make sure the flash drives all get updated?

Next, for anything you do allow to be copied off the machine, you need an audit trail to say who copied it, where and when. That's more complicated still. It's a DRM problem, and those always involve twisted thinking. There's always a hole.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Securing a computer against its own users means it's not really a computer any more.
PPS - I guess we just do our best and hope it's enough.

Personal backup recommendation update

I'm going to adjust my recommendations for personal offsite backup for you photos and videos, but not by much. I used to say "burn your photos and videos to a DVD and take that to work". These days, I have more than that. Lots more. So my new recommendation is to buy a portable hard drive and set up SyncToy (from Microsoft) to keep all your personal media synchronised to the drive. Bring it home every now and then, sync to it, then carry it back to work. If you've got the space on your work PC, you can sync to that hard drive, too, and use the external drive just for carrying the large data sets.

This is more expensive than the DVD option. If you've got small enough collections, you might do better to buy a large flash drive rather than a huge portable hard drive. Use your own judgement on that. One suggestion, though: don't bring it home every single weekend. If your house catches fire on a weekend, then you're still boned. Mix it up.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is also relevant since many computers are being sold without disc burners these days.
PPS - I'm not sure what to do if a tablet is your primary computer. Online backup is probably your best bet.

Readiness

I keep a lot of windows open on my computer most of the time. At work, I'd typically have email, web browser (with up to 10 tabs), several file browser windows, two simple note-taking programs, a project timer, one personal wiki, one plain text file editor, a development environment and, quite often, a database management window. That doesn't count Dropbox, TeamViewer and Belvedere, the apps that run in my system tray. Oh, and I forgot Wunderlist, my action list program.

Is that excessive? Perhaps. Maybe it's a case of laziness or impatience. If I close things down when I'm not focused on them, I need to spend extra time doing that when I switch away, and I need to spend extra time waiting for it to come back when I need it again. This is about speed and convenience. It's how I need my computer to work for me. Quickly and without getting in the way.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I try to write my software that way, too.
PPS - It's why my note-taking program doesn't need a "new note" button. You jus start typing.

Defaults can trump quality

Defaults can trump quality more easily than you might think. There are several better web browsers in existence than Internet Explorer, but since IE is the default on Windows, that's what a staggering number of people use. Lots of other programs out-perform Adobe Reader for displaying PDFs, but, again, it's the default program and that can mean more than quality. If a default option is easy and works well enough, very few people are going to go looking for the best option, or even a slightly better one.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is also how a lot of fast food places stay in business.
PPS - And a fair few TV shows.

Cleaning externalities

Practically everything about the quality of their work is an externality to a contract cleaner - it doesn't affect them. If the toilet looks mostly clean and they won't get fired for it, that's good enough. If the paper rolls are loaded the wrong way around for the dispenser and they're glued together, that can be a frustration for anyone who uses the bathroom, but not to the cleaner if it won't get them fired. If the floor is vacuumed in all the major traffic areas, but not behind the plants or under the stairs every day, that's good enough. Pretty much everything falls into that category. It is in their best interests to do their job just barely well enough to avoid getting fired. That is the only way their work directly affects them.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Once you start noticing half-hearted cleaning, you keep seeing it everywhere.
PPS - So, I guess I'm sorry for doing that to you.

Cushy jobs

The cushy jobs have to go to the stupid people. Do you want the best and brightest wasting their time somewhere that their work is essentially meaningless? Do you want the dummies in charge of critical, high-pressure situations?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Some would say dummies in power is how we ended up with failed banks.
PPS - I think that was greed, though.

Proposal quid pro quo

There may come a day when the response to a marriage proposal becomes as important as the proposal itself. I mean, do you want someone to go to the trouble of arranging a flash mob dance number with fireworks and a lion tamer only to say a simple "yes" at the end? A mere "yes" hardly does such effort justice, does it? Instead, you should go and plan your own surprise event with skywriting, fire jugglers and jet ski ramp jumps to deliver your positive response. It's only fair.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Where are those YouTube videos?
PPS - At some point in the distant future, I guess.

We need a mobile power breakthrough

We really do need a breakthrough in mobile computing. We keep wanting to run more powerful processors with bigger screens and more demanding software in a thinner package. The end result is dramatically reduced battery life, to the point that you can barely get through your waking hours on one full battery charge. People have started to look at this problem, but the answers so far are other ways to charge up - at the desk at work, a luggable backup battery, even solar panels. These stop-gap measures only stand in the way. We will soon end up with high-end phones that you unplug at 6am and expect to have dead batteries by the time you get home from work, without even really using it.

More compact battery technology would be a start, but our advances in this space have been incremental rather than revolutionary. Lower-power hardware would help, but probably not enough, especially if we take that as a cue to run ever more demanding software on it. Basically, our increasing demands on mobile computing technology are slowly eroding the very thing we designed them for. Eventually, if we continue on this path, the advantages of mobile will disappear altogether because the batteries suck so hard that they need to sit in a charging cradle non-stop.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Every couple of years I get a new phone and have to charge it more often. Right now it's often twice per day.
PPS - I know I wrote about this not too long ago, but it keeps coming up.

Windows Experience Index should consider RAM amount

I think it's a shame that the Windows Experience Index only takes RAM speed into account, not the RAM amount. You could be running Windows 7 on 2GB of very fast memory, and the Experience Index will tell you that is very good when, in fact, it's not good enough.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My computers all say they'd do better with a beefier graphics card.
PPS - I don't know if I've ever run a high-end graphics card in my machines.

The speed of progress indicators

As humans, we make progress on monotonous tasks in an uneven way. When we start out, we're full of energy and tend to make quick progress. In the middle, we're tired of it and there seems to be no end in sight, so we go more slowly. Near the end, we speed up again because we're getting closer and we just want to finish.

Computers, of course, are not like that. They make progress evenly, and so they should. Perhaps, however, we should scale progress indicator bars to allow for that fast-slow-fast pattern and make it look more natural to people. For the first parts of the task, mark off sections of the progress bar quickly, then slow down in the middle, then speed it up again at the end. I'd like to do some testing to see whether this affects people's perception of the speed of the task. It might actually turn out to be better to reverse the process, going very slowly at the beginning when users have the high energy to allow for that, speed up in the middle to offset the user's lowered energy, and slow down again at the end.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Some progress bars already seem to be fast in the middle and slow at the end.
PPS - So maybe someone already thought of this.

Hotel price comparison comparison, ad nauseum

Every hotel has a booking website. To make the comparisons easier, people have set up separate price comparison websites. But which one of those should you use? Perhaps we need a hotel price meta-comparison website, to help you find the best hotel comparison website before you start actually comparing hotels.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Just make sure we don't set up more than one of those.
PPS - Because that would get really messy.

Taxonomy doesn't lead to understanding

A lot of what I would call "taxonomic philosophy" questions, such as "do digital natives exist?" or "is this thing a 'real' game or not?" disappear when you consider what the results of the answer will be. If you figure out whether a certain piece of interactive art is a game or not, what will be the outcome of that answer? Will people have more or less fun playing it? Will its value go up or down? I don't think anything much changes, and that's the point. There's a difference between understanding something and classifying it. Classification is not an act of understanding but of filing and grouping. That doesn't really lead to anything but more refined definitions of the classifications that you yourself developed. If other people don't agree with those classifications, then there's very little basis to argue with them. You drew an imaginary line and said "these things belong here", but so what if they don't? Knowing the type of thing to call a particular object, person or concept doesn't put you in any closer relationship with it. In fact, it may distance you from it, because if you only play "real" games, there are all kinds of experiences, many of them positive, that you will never have, just because you decided already what did and did not fit into your world.

In short, classification and its related questions do not lead to deeper understanding.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We should do less of them.
PPS - And we should do more understanding of each other.

Motion-sensor lights

In what rooms of the house does it make sense to change all light switches to motion sensors? I think the only place it wouldn't make sense is anywhere you want it to remain dark - the bedroom and maybe home theatre. Everywhere else, it makes more sense, to me, to have motion sensors so that the lights are only on when people are present, and, furthermore, come on automatically when people arrive. I've seen motion-sensor lights becoming more common in offices. I think they'll start being used in homes before too long.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You probably still need kill-switches for when you're going to change the bulbs.
PPS - Or else it would be like a heist movie every time as you try to move slowly enough not to set it off.

Spotting found footage fakes

Whenever alleged "found footage" begins a few seconds before the amazing, once-in-a-lifetime occurrence or the blink-and-you-miss-it weirdness, you should be suspicious.

It usually looks like several seconds of why-would-you-film-this banality until someone suddenly says "OMG LOOK AT THAT!" and the camera swivels around to see the monster/alien/cryptid/magic for a second. Real footage of such unusual events would begin several seconds after the exclamation, at best, and that's if someone whips out their phone immediately. Also, anything that zooms in was probably not filmed on a phone.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not actually that familiar with high-end phone cameras.
PPS - They might zoom. But I doubt anyone thinks of that in the moment.

Amazon should have Kindle sales events like Steam

Amazon should take a cue from Steam and run limited-time specials on Kindle ebooks and send me email when books on my wish list go on sale. I'd end up buying more books, I'm sure, just the way I've bought a lot of games from Steam that I don't have time to play.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Perhaps their publisher agreements don't allow that.
PPS - Which is the equivalent of "we don't like money", but that's their loss.

Working better with YouTube subscriptions

When I subscribe to a YouTube channel, I do so because I want to watch basically everything they upload, or I at least want to have a clear view of new uploads on that channel. The best possible arrangement, for me, would be to have all new uploads from my subscription channels added automatically to my Watch Later playlist. For now, here's the best solution I've found:

Get an RSS Feed Of Your Youtube Subscriptions

This page describes how to get an RSS feed for all your subscriptions, which you can use in any news reader of your choice. I've added it to Feedly, which I use for my news since Google set fire to Google Reader. Anyway, it's a fairly simple matter of making your subscriptions public, finding your user ID and pasting it into a GData URL. It looks pretty good to me so far.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's made my subscriptions useful, anyway.
PPS - I like working with single feeds for similar purposes.