Ice challenge vs troll status traps

A few "challenges" and games have been going around Facebook in my circles lately, as tends to happen from time to time, and they're often put forward as non-optional for people you've either deliberately dobbed in or who have fallen into a trap of some kind. I'd like to mention two that came my way to illustrate the differences.

The first was the "ice challenge". The idea (at least in the mutant version that came my way) is to either donate $10 to charity and tip 3 buckets of ice water over your head or to donate $100 and stay warm. I opted to go for the ice, because I thought it would be more fun to participate than to chicken out, with or without charity donations. I posted the video, donated the money and nominated 5 friends, 2 of whom took on the ice and 3 of whom made no response at all. That's their right. This isn't law, but I thought it was a bit of fun, and since there was charity involved, I figured I might as well participate.

The other "challenge" was a plain old trolling trap of a status update. One person posts a worrying status from a pre-written list, then anyone who likes or comments gets stabbed with the same list and a demand that they, too, post one of the worrying statuses without any explanation. I commented just to see what was up, and found out. I declined that particular challenge, because it just felt like pure troll-bait to me. You get your friends worried about you, or at least confused and curious, then when they express their concern, you punish them for it. There didn't seem to be much positive fun in that, and I said so. I'm not going to propagate something like that.

Is there a difference between the two? From some perspectives, no, not really. They're both somewhat involuntary to get into, and they both propagate among friends like a meme. On the other hand, the difference I see is that one is a "gotcha" game of trolling and one is more of a dare where charities benefit. Maybe the difference is subtle. I don't know. I just know that I'm not going to bait my friends and family into expressing some misguided concern, then attack them for it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - No offense meant to anyone who has played along with the status trolling game.
PPS - If I hadn't had friends opt out of the ice challenge, I might have just played along with trolling, too.

The retrofuturism of Hyperland

Watching "Hyperland", a documentary about early ideas of interactive media as they were being developed in the 1990s, I saw that a lot of the vision has come to pass, but in ways that the original creators might not have imagined. Instead of an intelligent agent rifling through the world's information for you, personally, we have Google (and others) scanning the web, indexing it and presenting that index for you to search. What we don't have, so much, is an ever-present "related sites" function. The "back" button was featured, which made sense, but then most links were presented as moving icons ("micons", according to the movie) over other video. It was pretty distracting. A large amount of what was described is embodied in Wikipedia. Most of the rest is Google and standard web browser functionality, but far less anthropomorphised and intelligent.

They got into VR as well, of course, because this was the 90s, then finished with an unintentionally hilarious idea of what VR would look like in 2003, which was then 10 years in the future. The headsets did look a bit like the Oculus Rift and other devices that exist today, though.

What struck me most was the way so many people seemed to envision encapsulated, carefully-curated, rich databases of information on narrow topics, such as one Picasso painting or Beethoven's 9th symphony, and how users would be encouraged to edit together their own content from them. These "databases", of course, resembled early "multimedia experience" programs from the early CD-ROM days. We don't tend to bother putting together media museums like that any more, even though we now have an internet capable of delivering them faster and better than in 1993.

One of the main thrusts of the program was that this interactive experience is far better than linear, non-interactive television, and would surely replace TV in the future. Of course now we treat the internet as very different from television, and we still have both. We use the internet to talk about and enhance television, and even to screen cheaper shows with global niche appeal instead of local majority appeal. It's recognisably similar to the future portrayed in Hyperland but, as is usually the case with futurism, fundamentally different, too.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's a fairly long program to explain the internet to an audience only familiar with TV, really.
PPS - And slightly ironic in that it's a completely linear, non-interactive video about how much better interactive, non-linear media are.

Interview performance

A job interview, for me, still brings out the nerves, even though I don't get nervous on stage. I think this is because improvisation has never been my strong suit. Even though you could make a case for a job interview being like a performance, there are some very important differences. For one, the interviewer is the only one who gets the script. Nobody is allowed to rehearse, at least not with full knowledge, there is only one performance, no audience, no director and no second chance. To top it all off, the interviewer is half trying to help and prompt you, to a degree, but also half trying to trip you up and make you fail. It's adversarial improvisation with unequal preparation and real consequences, but only on my side of the table.

The whole interview process is set up to favour people who are strong personal communicators face to face and that's it. Unless that's the job, I think you should find a better way to test actual job skills rather than interrogating someone whose job is going to involve staring at a computer screen most of the day.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've had some companies screen by programming puzzle.
PPS - They were the best ones.

Software project estimation will always be hard

Software estimation has always been an issue. There's just no way around it, as long as people demand to know long in advance how long a software project is going to take, and especially if they'll get upset if it takes longer. While I appreciate that finance and budgets work a certain way - you have this much money, this much time and this project to do, is it possible? - I also recognise that software is notoriously difficult to predict.

We don't even have a great way to measure software project size. If you're building a bridge, you know how long it will have to be to go from here to there. Estimating a software project is like asking how many blueprints will be needed to design the bridge, but without any clear definition of "blueprint", or even "how many". Probably the best measurement to use is a nebulous Task, which must be broken down far enough that it will probably take an average programmer less than a day to do, and can be clearly seen to be done or not done (never, ever "90% done").

The problem is generating that task list. At that stage of a project, you won't know how big the project is, nor how complex the tasks it requires. To find that out, I think you just have to start. You might not even get a good idea of how large and complex a software project is until it's a quarter of the way complete. The most honest and accurate answer to the feasibility of the project at the beginning is "I can't know".

It seems the only way to get good at estimating software is to spend years trying and failing first, until you develop a good enough intuition about project sizes and how to break them down into tasks.

Once you do have that task list, however, you can start projecting a finish date by using "velocity charts". If you have a record of all your required tasks, then you can track how many are active at any given time and, as long as you're completing them at a rate faster than you're adding them, that graph will, eventually reach zero. If you add a margin around that, based on how far out it is, then you'll get a range estimate for your release date. As that date nears, you'll get more and more certain about exactly when all your tasks will be complete.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - A velocity chart can be depressing if it only goes up.
PPS - Or even if it just stays level.

Pros and cons of cloud desktops for business

I think there might be something to the idea of company desktop environments stored in the cloud, as long as they are available offline, too. It obliterates the problems of BYOD policies, because the work environment is secured in the cloud, separate from the hardware. Whether the company or the employee provides the hardware is irrelevant. It neatly separates personal and work environments, even to the point of the preferred operating systems being irrelevant. It assists in remote work, too, because now you don't need to supply remote connection software and support that for everyone. In or out of the office, you're using the same environment with the same capabilities. It also means it's very easy to upgrade or downgrade a user's computer power as needed - you just have to adjust the settings on their cloud desktop.

It does raise some concerns, however. First, cloud desktops are probably going to be slow and frustrating to use, so they'll be worse in that way than local desktops. That's the way most people will care about. Second, it does put an extra burden (or maybe a different burden) on IT support, because now they need to make sure everyone can access the remote desktops from whatever is their host system of choice. That could be a problem. Third, it's harder to trust remote storage for some businesses, especially since government agencies can just wander in and copy the data whenever they want. Storing everything in the cloud is a risk for them.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I haven't heard of anyone trying this.
PPS - One big reason would be the huge expense involved at today's rates.

Pre-funding TV show rescues from cancellation

What if, instead of petitions or letter-writing campaigns to save our favourite TV shows from cancellation, we just ran our own Kickstarter funding drives? That way, assuming the audience is there, when the network calls "cancel", we can respond with "Oh, yeah? Here's your next season funded right now. UNCANCELLED!" I'd get behind this. In fact, I'd be happy for some shows to put some cash in escrow in case of cancellation - an emergency fund, if you will.

It's not without problems, of course. First, how do you trust that this cash is going to the right people in the first place? What would be to stop someone setting up a fund, slapping the name "Firefly" on it, then pocketing some cash and disappearing, before a trademark dispute can even be raised? Second, you don't want the emergency fund to be the lazy fallback position. If the studio hears that there's a few million dollars held in trust, they might be less likely to greenlight the next season with their own money. Just say its cancelled, grab the rescue fund and carry on. Zero investment, full profit. Third, you want to get the rights right. You don't want fans swooping in droves to save a cancelled show, only to have the network pick it back up and, again, pocket the profits. If the angel investors are the show's fans, they should get a cut of the profits for funding like this. Point 3 should cancel out point 2. Unless you paid in, you don't get cash out. Fourth, and perhaps the biggest problem, by the time the public hears about a show being cancelled, it's way too late to save it. By then, the props and costumes are warehoused, recycled or pillaged, the sets are torn down and the stages reassigned, plus the writers, actors and other crew are looking for their next gig. The network completely dismantles a show, then makes the press release to say it's over, and then the fans cry out in an uproar. We need to get in just at the point where the studio decides their money is better spent elsewhere.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If we can get in at that point, this might work.
PPS - Or we might learn that TV is way more expensive than we thought.

Urban camouflage

Urban camouflage doesn't mean blending in with buildings. It means blending in with people. If you want to be camouflaged in an urban setting, you don't use the same tactics as for jungle or desert camouflage, where you try to blend into the background. You should try to look like people who belong there. Boring people not worth a second look.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That's how real ninjas did it.
PPS - Apparently.

Blu-Ray doesn't work for me

I have, as yet, not had a single Blu-Ray movie play all the way through without some kind of issue on my Panasonic player. I've been encouraged to update the firmware, which never seemed to change anything (after all, the main point of firmware updates is to make sure the player refuses to operate in the circumstances that Hollywood dictates, so I can't imagine it ever adding functionality or fixing anything significant), and sometimes the discs still refuse to even load afterwards. There have always been entire scenes that wouldn't play at all. For example, the middle of The Internship when they go out on the town, or the entire last 20 minutes of Vampire Academy.

I know it's not the player itself, at least in general, because DVDs have zero issues. Not one, not ever, except with badly scratched rentals. All my own well-cared-for discs play perfectly every time.

This is why I blame the Blu-Ray standard itself, and I won't be buying any more of those discs. It's been noted that Blu-Ray demand is falling in the USA much faster than Sony anticipated. Some people think this is because of Netflix and streaming services. Personally, I think Blu-Ray is doing everything it can to self-destruct, and this is just the "Mission Accomplished" moment.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Plus, streaming services can be pretty great.
PPS - Or they can be terrible, like Ultraviolet.

Unique language sarcasm tones

I read recently that the sound of sarcasm is different in every language. You might think that verbal sarcasm would be easy to detect regardless of the language, but that's just not the case. This does, however, make sense of a story Arj Barker told about performing in Germany. His sarcasm-based comedy didn't quite seem to hit the mark, and even allowing for the idea that English might have been his audience's second language, this would better explain why they didn't seem to get it: they didn't know how to listen for the English-speaking sarcasm tone.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Fortunately, on the internet, we can all detect sarcasm in text perfectly.
PPS - Just like that.

Facebook Save proves Facebook doesn't like to share

I'm not a huge fan of the way Facebook wants to be a "roach motel" on the internet: content checks in, it doesn't check out. It's a problem on the mobile app more than the desktop website, because sometimes I'll see an article I want to read, or a video I want to watch, but I can't right now. From that point of view, I'm glad they've introduced "Facebook Save", which is a glorified bookmarking feature to let you save an article for reading later, into a special feed on the Facebook site.

What bothers me is that this plays straight into their roach motel business model. See, there are plenty of other bookmarking tools out there, and plenty of services to save articles to read later. I use one of them often. It's called Pocket, and it's fantastic. This Facebook one could very easily be replaced by Pocket, if only the Facebook mobile app had a "share" function that worked with the normal Android "share" channel, instead of assuming that Facebook is the only place I would ever want to share something I found on Facebook.

This was clearly not the easier path for Zuckerberg Incorporated. Adding a whole new level of functionality to Facebook should not be the default behaviour. It's big, it's potentially buggy, and it reinvents the wheel. The only reason to behave this way is to avoid the suggestion that there's anything on the web but Facebook itself. In other words, Facebook went to a lot of trouble and expense to keep you on their site, rather than learning to share.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've checked for the new function but I can't find it yet.
PPS - Functions like this tend to roll out slowly.

A hard lesson in supply and demand

When I was a young boy I tried various ways of making money, as many children often do. Since my parents were right there and we had a decent supply of fairly thick paper in the house (scrapped printouts from Dad's work) I decided I could make bookmarks and sell them. I scribbled on a page, cut it neatly into long rectangles, and my parents patiently bought one each for the wildly inflated sum of 20 cents.

This is where my tiny brain began to misunderstand the economy of the situation. "If one bookmark gets me 20 cents," I thought to myself, "then 10 bookmarks will get me $2!" I began scribbling and cutting, even designing in new features such as a line marker arrow to show where on the page you had finished reading. With my genius new bookmarks, I once again made my sales pitch to my parents, who explained to me that they simply didn't need that many bookmarks. I thought maybe I could sell them to the neighbours, if we went door to door, but again (saving us all some embarrassment) I was turned down before that plan got off the ground. I had oversupplied my market and my thriving bookmark business was done before it really got started.

At other times, my friends and I picked mulberries from a tree in our back yard, packaged them in cups and managed to sell some to the neighbours, who were probably (again) just being polite, but I believe we ran out of customers before we ran out of our small cups of over-ripe bitter berries.

I can't recall any other money-making schemes I undertook, but I do remember every time feeling either disheartened at the lack of demand or being denied the opportunity to sell my wares. I don't know if this ruined the entrepreneurial spirit in me or if I never had a good grasp of the concept in the first place.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In either case, I haven't started any businesses lately.
PPS - Or created any products to sell, either.

Cloud doesn't mean much

With the movie "Sex Tape" out now, and the trailer containing the phrase "Nobody understands the Cloud!", perhaps it's time to give ourselves a definition we can use. Ready? Here goes:

The Cloud is the internet, when marketers want it to sound new.

There. Now you understand the Cloud. If you want to go into more detail, the word "Cloud" is most often used to describe services provided over the internet, such as file synchronisation or database storage. This is, again, because of marketing, but there's nothing new or special about these services except the name "Cloud". The internet was perfectly capable of these services before companies built them, and it's still the internet afterwards. "Cloud" is just their word to make you think they've done something brand new and revolutionary when all they've done is put some extra services online that weren't online before.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's faster to say, so I guess that's something good.
PPS - I wouldn't call that quite enough, though.

The stickiness of choice

When you look at the table of which big digital marketplaces sell what kind of experiences - books, movies, TV, apps, music, games - it certainly looks like there's lots of competition, and there is. However, the lack of compatibility and the abundance of DRM in the space makes each choice much more "sticky". If you buy a Microsoft Surface, for instance, you won't be running any Android apps. If you buy an iPhone, you will find yourself also buying your music, your books and your movies from Apple, too, because they won't work anywhere else. And the more you buy there, the less you will be willing to change platforms. You make your choice once, and then the inability to pick up your stuff and take it somewhere else means that you are stuck, unless you are willing to abandon your whole library and start over.

Furthermore, even where there is some compatibility (as with, say, the Kindle app on Android) you are unlikely to take advantage of it, because the fragmentation of your library is a major pain. I don't want half my books in the Google Play Books app and half in Kindle. Why would I? I'd have to remember what collection each one is in, and that's more likely to depend on purchase price than on any kind of theme. It's far easier to choose one platform and stick with it, because anything you buy in one place is locked to that place. You don't own it, you just pay to look at it through a window. If you walk away from that window, your stuff stays there, because it was never yours. Human nature fights very strongly against that kind of sunk cost. If I paid for it, then I feel that it is mine, and I shouldn't be punished for wanting to take it elsewhere. Because I am prevented from taking it elsewhere, I stay where I am and defend the one choice I made several years ago.

This is the way we are building the world now: all the world's media is sectioned into a series of deep holes, and you get to choose which one to jump down, but only once.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not a big fan of deliberate incompatibility.
PPS - The best software needs to be compatible with multiple other programs or else it's pointless.

Cooking at the office

Something I would like to see some top creative chefs attempt is cooking at the office. Going beyond reheated leftovers and the occasional toasted sandwich, what can you prepare and eat, in the space of 30 minutes, with the tools available at most offices (microwave, boiling water, toaster at minimum, and perhaps sandwich press and coffee drip, if you're lucky)? I expect you'd be using a fair amount of foil and getting creative with the sandwich press most of the time, but I'm barely a home cook, let alone a real chef, so my impression might not be accurate.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You could probably bring an electric stove top if you were desperate.
PPS - You wouldn't want to prepare it all from scratch, either, I'm guessing.

What I think of what I make doesn't matter

For some reason just recently, my mind went back to a church service in 2005 when we had some artistic displays. I put together an origami diorama representing the created world: frogs, butterflies, flowers, grass, that type of thing. To me, it looked ugly, hasty and uncreative, especially next to the beautiful things I saw beside it. I was embarrassed by it. You can read my original rant here.

With some distance in time from that service, what actually stands out to me is what my friend Erin said in response. None of that quality-based judgement even crossed her mind at the time. My clumsy creation got her thinking about the world in terms of God's creative act. The way I thanked her for that observation, at least on this blog, was to harp on again about how I didn't want my name on the piece. Well, I'm apologising for that now. I'm sorry, Erin. You went out of your way to tell me that something I made had a positive effect on you, so thank you. I want to spread more of that positivity around.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm also sorry it took me 9 years to gain the necessary maturity.
PPS - Also, huh, I've been blogging here for 10 years as of March. I didn't notice.

Desktop kitchen appliances for work?

I was wondering, after making a third trip to the office kitchen in a short time, whether there could be any high-end executive desktop appliances built for a single user, such as a desktop dishwasher. This would, of course, complement your desktop espresso machine, so that you could make coffee, drink it and wash up all without getting off your chair. Add a little microwave and a fridge and your desktop kitchen could handle all of lunch, too. You might start feeling like you're working in a grown-up version of a child's play kitchen, though, and you'd need to handle water supply and drainage somehow, too. I can imagine one small water supply tank hooked up to the coffee maker, dishwasher and (why not?) personal cold water tap, too. The waste water could be handled with a similar system, and all you'd have to do is empty out your waste tank when it got full and top up your supply tank for the day.

Perhaps this falls under the category of a kind of "glamping kitchenette" - something you might plug into your generator in your mutant cabin/tent hybrid when you're a short way from civilisation.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I need a Kickstarter campaign, pronto.
PPS - Though I can't imagine calling it a "glamping kitchenette" for long.

Pride in your work is not quality

It is possible to be so proud of the effort it took to make your art that you become blinded to the (lack of) quality of the finished product. What you see when you look at it is the culmination of many hours of difficult work, far better than what you could have produced before you started. What everyone else sees is a painting of a two-dimensional dog with weird proportions.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I always worry about this with my own artistic efforts, no matter their type.
PPS - Lately, of course, it's my writing.

Guessing jelly beans in a jar by volume

Ever since reading an article about the packing density of M&Ms and how to calculate very closely how many fit into a given volume, I've been excited to give the technique a try on a real contest. There have been two contests I've encountered since then, but in both cases the jar was filled with jelly beans, not M&Ms. The technique still stands, but I have always found myself trying to look up the packing factor of jelly beans rather than referencing the M&Ms paper. The best answers I can find online don't state the actual packing factor, but give advice on how to calculate it. You would think, at some point, someone would have figured this out, but apparently not. Perhaps, then, I can be the first to publish a jelly bean packing factor calculation.

In the most recent competition, I was off by 4 beans. I guessed at 2cm^3 per bean and 80% packing efficiency. This means you just have to multiply the volume of the container (in cubic centimetres or millilitres) by 0.4 and you'll get a pretty good estimate. The container in the last contest I encountered was 2 litres, so I guessed 800 beans. The answer was 796 and, unfortunately, someone else had guessed 795, so they won.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Note that these are "standard" jelly beans, about 2cm long.
PPS - The much smaller "Jelly Belly" brand or any other size won't work with this calculation.

Class of 1979

This year for my birthday, I'd like to point out some of the famous people born in the same year as me, particularly those born in the same month. The closest 1979 birthday to mine that I recognise is Jayma Mays, who appears on Glee, born 6 days after me.

Other celebrities of note (to me) born in my year include:

Singers:

• Adam Levine (Maroon 5, 18 March)
• Alecia Moore (P!nk, 8 September)
• Pete Wentz (Fall Out Boy, 5 June)

Actors:

• Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight, 4 April)
• Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad, 27 August)
• Jennifer Morrison (House, 12 April)
• James McAvoy (X-Men: First Class, 21 April)
• Jennifer Love Hewitt (you know ... stuff, 21 February)
• Kate Hudson (those other things, 19 April)
• Felicia Day (The Guild, 28 June)

Seems like, if I wanted to be a famous actor, I should have been born in April instead of July. Maybe I should start lying about that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also, I was born on what would have been Nikola Tesla's 123rd birthday.
PPS - I've probably missed a lot. The Wikipedia category for 1979 births is huge.

Writing Letters to my Lost Children

Recently I wrote a short piece called "Six Letters to My Lost Children", about our experiences going through failed IVF cycles over the past five years. It's raw, it's very personal and it was quite emotional to write. I suppose it was part of my personal grieving process. I won't be posting it publicly anywhere, at least in its current form, mostly because it includes the names of our friends (just in passing, because they were there for us through the process) and I don't want to publish anything about them without their permission, nor do I really want to seek their permission to say even nice things about them in this context. It's mixed up in all that personal emotional stuff. I'm quite pleased with the writing, so I am simultaneously proud of it, wanting to show it off, and also rather guarded about it, because of its emotional weight.

So it raises a few questions. One, is it actually any good, or was it just very emotional for me, clouding my impression of it? Two, if it's any good, should I try to fictionalise it and have it published? Three, if I try to fictionalise it, changing the names and details to protect the innocent, will that bleach out all of the emotion, thereby rendering it into bland, unpublishable cardboard? It's a dilemma. If it's good because it's raw, then it needs to stay raw to stay good, but if it's too private to publish as-is, then it needs to be edited.

In the end, this is probably something that needs to stay private, unless I can find another way to write with the same emotion about it and still maintain the privacy of my friends, my family and myself.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I did show it to Debbie, though.
PPS - It was quite cathartic.

Outward-focused self-esteem

I tend to have an outward focus for my self-esteem. I want to be loved and appreciated. This has a way of being naturally disappointing, because compliments and appreciation (except from my wife) can be pretty thin on the ground. It's also something I can't control. You can seek to be loved, aim and plan, perhaps plot and scheme to be loved, but ultimately you pin your happiness on other people, and it's going to be a letdown.

The only thing you can control is yourself, and as much as I know this, I fall back on external expectations. I think it's because I don't know what to do with myself to build self-esteem. How do I become the kind of person I respect? Self-improvement has always been a little bit hit and miss with me, and if I knew how to change that, it wouldn't have been a problem in the first place.

For the most part, I only know how to be negative with myself. I know it doesn't do any good, but it's a hard habit to change.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I just can't break down a self-esteem goal into small, achievable, measurable steps.
PPS - Any hints? Anyone?

The most expensive TV to produce

As expensive as Game of Thrones is to produce, it is still not coming close to Friends, believe it or not. The long-running sitcom cost upwards of $10M per episode in its final season, simply due to rising salaries of the six principal actors. I assume this will not be an issue with Game of Thrones, where characters have a habit of dying horrible deaths quite often.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then again, there are plenty of GoT characters who probably won't die.
PPS - To which George RR Martin obviously replies: "Challenge accepted!"

Working hours

People used to worry, back at the advent of computers and labour-saving devices, that people would have far too much leisure time, and that society would need to find ways to occupy so many idle people. It seems astounding now that nobody thought we'd just find more work for people to do. Instead of getting the equivalent of a 1950s 40-hour work week done in 20 hours and sitting on our hands the rest of the week, the companies enlarged their scopes. If you get your work done twice as quickly, then you can obviously handle twice as much work, and the company can take on twice as many projects for the same labour costs. So that's what we did.

That pattern will only continue. You'll never build such a wonderful machine that you reduce the hours in the working week. You probably won't get to reduce the stress or the effort involved, either. All it will do is increase the amount of work that can be accomplished with the same amount of effort and time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - "Labour-saving" became "productivity-enhancing".
PPS - It's the quiet kind of bleak future.

When wifi is slower than mobile data

Sometimes my phone latches onto a wifi hotspot that I've connected to before, such as on the train, but most public wifi requires a click-through pinky-swear agreement to behave yourself while on their network (which I'm sure would hold up in court, right?) so that means I have to open my browser, wait for the redirect page to load, tick a box, tap a button and wait for another page to load, and *then* I can start using data. When I'm only walking past a cafe or park, this is worse than pointless - it's obstructive.

My point is that my phone is designed to use wifi when possible because it's supposed to be faster, but a lot of the time it ends up being slower due to click-through terms and conditions. My wife knows this. She lives by this observation so much that she never turns on wifi on her phone if she can avoid it. To her, it is unquestionable truth that "wifi is too slow". It shouldn't be, but it is. I have only recently convinced her to turn on wifi when she watches video or updates her software (which she also does only when forced). I live as if wifi is the best option. I leave mobile data turned off unless I absolutely need it. Deb leaves wifi turned off because she has a far more pragmatic view of her phone. Either it does what she needs, right now, as fast as possible, or it's broken. She may have a point.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The only advantage wifi seems to have is that it's cheaper.
PPS - That cost saving comes with a trade-off for convenience and (sometimes) security, though.

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.