Finding the perfect shoe

I have solved the problem of women's shoes forever, as long as you think the problem is never finding shoes that fit and match your clothes. With a 3D printer in your home, assuming you can find goop that wears well, you could print shoes that fit your feet perfectly and always match your clothes. You'd never be without the perfect pair of shoes, but you would have to put in work to design and print them yourself.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And you'd probably end up with a house full of prototype shoes.
PPS - Which I know sounds like winning to some people.

Diminished Reality

Diminished Reality is a real-time video processing system that can erase objects from live video. The demo only looks at stationary objects, which I suppose is the limitation so far, but I suspect it will not be too long before it can remove people from video. The upshot of this is a new nifty feature for script writers to incorporate into their next heist movie.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The thieves just need to load the software into the security system.
PPS - And selectively erase themselves, of course.

One-time password keyrings

At some point we have to acknowledge that those little RSA random-number one-time-password keyrings are not the answer to our security problems. For one, if every password was backed up with a unique one-time-password token, I would be carrying more of those things than keys on my keyring, and would probably need a big old-style janitor's keyring to keep them all. You know, the kind that's so big you could slide it on your arm all the way up to your shoulder? I'd also have a lot of trouble telling them apart.

Okay, so what do we do instead? Probably the best compromise is SMS as a second factor, since we all have mobile phones. If your objection to that solution is that it's too easy to steal, remember the tokens. They're even easier to lose.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm sure someone could come up with better two-factor authentication.
PPS - As long as it's genuinely two-factor

Friday Zombie Blogging - Undead Banana

A drawing of a zombie banana. Just look at it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The text says "old bananas never die".
PPS - I guess they just fade away.

Indispensable tools

I don't think any individual tool qualifies as "indispensable". What matters most is that some solution exists to the common problems of life, such as communication, transport, food and shelter. The telephone could be replaced by Skype, your car by communal dirigibles, the supermarket and your fridge by local farmer's markets and your private house by a staked-out area in one enormous aircraft hangar for your community. The world doesn't need to look and behave like it does today for society to keep working.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The internet could be replaced by carrier pigeons.
PPS - A lot of pigeons.

Negativity and the security mindset

Does security thinking foster a negative attitude? When you're thinking about things in security terms, you think about what would make it fail and what the results of failure are. If you carry that way of thinking into everyday life, it's probable that you would see a lot of things very negatively. It wouldn't necessarily affect you that way, but it would be a strong tide to push against.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Perhaps it would work out like negative visualisation.
PPS - That is, picturing negatives makes you appreciate your current positives.

Password generation

Using the same password everywhere is easy but insecure. If one account is compromised, they all are. Using different passwords everywhere is more secure, but much harder, because you have to remember a whole lot more different things. Perhaps a good compromise is a hybrid scheme where you construct site-specific passwords based on their context. You'd have a normal, short password as your base, then mentally construct the rest from the website name.

So, say (as a bad example) that you're using "abc123" as your base password and want to sign up to Dropbox. You decide you will append the last 4 letters of the site in reverse order to your base password, so your Dropbox password becomes "abc123xobp". Then later you create a Google account, so your password there is "abc123elgo". Unique passwords, memorable (to you, hopefully) so there's nothing to write down.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Personally I use KeePass to generate random passwords.
PPS - But that means I'm helpless without it.

Unreliable networks and tools to use them

Despite the way our internet connections are getting faster and more reliable, sometimes we have to deal with file transfers and remote control over network connections that are somewhat below the minimum reliability threshold. In those cases, it helps to have systems in place that can tolerate a lot more network interruption than is expected these days.

For instance, say you need to run some maintenance programs on a server that's halfway around the world, and the network between that point and your desk is dropping out once every minute. A normal remote desktop session isn't going to cut it, because it expects a constant connection and a certain bandwidth. You'd do better with commands relayed asynchronously, perhaps via an intermediary.

And very large file transfers in such circumstances should not have to be done in one go, because it probably won't happen. You need something that can resume when it drops out and retry parts that don't work properly. Today's standard methods simply don't expect or handle unreliable networks.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Akira would probably fit the bill for the first part.
PPS - And I've already written about Bittorrent for the second.

Google Chrome vs Firefox

I heard that Google's web browser, Chrome, was gaining popularity among my people, so I decided to give it a go. For a week at work I've been using Chrome for my personal web browsing, which might not have been the best test, since I don't do that much personal browsing at work. The pros and cons, as I see them, weighed up as follows.

Since I use Delicious.com for my bookmarks, I didn't have options to import anything, so I had to find things manually. The Home button doesn't show up by default, and I don't notice any particular speed improvements over Firefox. I also slightly miss my Facebook toolbar and the way Firefox protects saved passwords with a local master password.

That said, Chrome makes better use of screen real-estate than Firefox and I quite like the history thumbnails that show up on new tabs. I also like the way extensions can load without requiring a browser restart.

So on the whole, not a big change, but a few points where Firefox could pick up some slack.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not sure which one I'll stick with long-term.
PPS - Probably Firefox, for now.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Movie zombies comparison

Know Your Movie Zombie Outbreak Survivability. This is just a graph of movie zombie types on axes of intelligence and speed.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Obviously the stupider and slower they are, the better.
PPS - Though it doesn't hurt to be well armed and to outnumber them.

Discounting iTunes gift cards

JB HiFi and various other retailers occasionally sell iTunes gift vouchers at a discounted price, so you're able to get, say, $40 iTunes credit for only $30 outlay. This means two things. One, it is cheaper to go through a middleman retailer for your iTunes credit than to hand your money directly to Apple. Two, Apple are selling these cards to retailers for less than their face value, presumably as a form of advertising for iTunes, and cutting off part of their profits as a result.

Whatever proportion of the sale goes to Apple when you buy directly from iTunes is probably half or less what they get from selling cards to retailers. And as it is easy to verify from many online sources, Apple's profit margin on iTunes is massive compared to what the publisher and artist get, so there's plenty of room to bargain. But why undercut themselves by so much? Well, it's either a way to get non-credit-card-holders onto iTunes or simple advertising, as I said earlier. If you get in the habit of buying from iTunes, sooner or later you'll stop bothering with the cards and just buy direct.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Even when they're generous, they're insidious.
PPS - Did you expect anything else?

What would happen to the Clem Jones Tunnel?

Even before the tunnel opened, there have been news stories about the imminent death of the Clem Jones Tunnel and the company that owns it. They're still kicking on, and they may yet find a way to turn a real profit, but my question is this: what happens if the company does die a horrible death? Our council has already said that they have no interest in buying and operating the tunnel, but somebody has to end up owning it. To what other uses could a tunnel like that be put, if not for toll-based transport? I suppose tecnically you could build a long, narrow, underground office in there, though then it might not meet fire safety standards.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The city council is still the most likely eventual owner.
PPS - And the only one that really makes sense.

Any shopping bags are a problem

You know, with everyone in such a state about shopping bags, almost nothing seems like a good option. Ordinary plastic shopping bags take forever to break down, get eaten by wildlife etc. Biodegradable plastics are expensive or don't work. Reusable green bags wear out and are made of pretty much the same stuff as the original plastic ones. Maybe the best option is to use unbleached paper bags made from recycled paper pulp. They go straight back to our home recycling bins to be remade into new bags. No fuss, no mess. The only problem with them would be strength, and I'm sure we can get around that one if we try.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or we could all get those old-style trolley bags.
PPS - But I'd feel silly with one of those.

Naming diseases

Is it more helpful to name diseases after their symptoms (eg whooping cough), the organs they affect (eg appendicitis), their discoverers (eg Wilson's disease) or something else entirely? Perhaps their cause? They'd each have their slight advantages, whether quicker diagnosis or teaching medical history. Sometimes I get the impression that some diseases could use better naming schemes, and they're usually the ones named after their discoverers.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also, since my medical opinion is based entirely on House, add a grain of salt.
PPS - It's never lupus.

Exercising to avoid sickness

I have heard people observe that when they feel themselves getting sick, exercise sometimes helps them stay well. Could there be anything to that? My only theory is that a raised body temperature from exercise does much the same thing as a fever would, and burns out the infection.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Getting yourself up and moving is another matter.
PPS - I never feel like being active while sick.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Zombie Studies

If you attend the University of Baltimore, you could sign up for English 333: zombie studies. Students will watch zombie movies and read zombie comics. Presumably, at some point, they are assessed on this in the traditional way, but I like to imagine a different scenario. At the end of the semester, the professor says to the whole class, "Let's see what you've learned!" and releases a horde of zombies into the room.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If you survive, you win.
PPS - If you die ... uh ... refund?

Audio bird dictionary

There's a kind of "book" that is only possible with modern technology: a reverse audio dictionary. By that I mean a way of looking up definitions by sounds that can't be written down. You could have an audio dictionary where you look up, say, "magpie" and hear its various sounds, but only with a microphone, a database and a little software processing could you play a sound and identify it. This has been done a few times now, with music, birds and probably some others, and it's one of those ways we skipped books for passing on expertise.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Without this, your only option is finding an expert.
PPS - Or not bothering at all.

Mobile plan data inclusions as standard

I am happy to discover that data inclusions are more common on mobile phone plans these days. When the iPhone first came out and included data was a synonym for iPhone, I was kind of bitter about it. There was nothing special about the iPhone's ability for mobile internet, but arm-twisting mobile providers into including a download allocation made it seem revolutionary. And it was, in a way, but to tie it exclusively to the iPhone hardware was nonsense. Now, finally, it seems like we're at the point where we admit other phones can use the mobile web too.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - As usual, I'm a little behind on this one.
PPS - I always get into stuff just as it's finishing being cool.

Search vs browsing

A search feature, if done well, is a good way to get to exactly what you want, quickly and easily. But the whole of human experience is not built on getting only what you're looking for. Lots of what we come to love gets accidentally discovered while browsing at random. It's a more time-intensive activity where things are not necessarily handed to you on a silver platter, but it can lead to some very rewarding experiences. This is why so many web catalogues need categories, featured products and suggestions. Search is only half the picture.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The only Google equivalent is the "I'm feeling lucky" button.
PPS - Or maybe Google Reader Play.

Running red lights, pedestrian crossings and blind people

I wonder if drivers would be more careful at pedestrian crossings if they saw a blind person standing there. When I cross the road outside the train station in the morning, I frequently see people run the red light, even after my pedestrian crossing light has gone green. I just wonder whether they would take more care if it looked like I would be responding instantly and automatically to the alert that sounds when the lights change.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Perhaps some day I'll try carrying a white cane to see what happens.
PPS - I'll have to establish some kind of baseline statistic first, though.

Before and After movie ratings

After being pleasantly surprised by the movie Easy A, I tried to come up with a before-and-after movie scoring system that would take surprise enjoyment and bitter disappointment into account.

Before seeing a movie, rate it out of five (no half scores) on how much you expect to enjoy it. Afterwards, rate it again on how much you did enjoy it. The final score is your after score squared divided by the before score. This means movies get a bonus if you go in with low expectations but are pleasantly surprised, and that you'll get a very low rating for being disappointed.

The disadvantage of the system, of course, is that it still gives a pretty big bonus to the low-expectations movies. The best score you can get for something you expected to be great is "5", but you get almost the same for a 1-before-2-after movie.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - So this might not be quite right yet.
PPS - But I think movies that exceed expectations should get extra credit.

Friday Zombie Blogging - A movie meta-poster

New website freakingaweso.me has a zombie poster depicting a zombie hand made up of distinct zombie movie, book or video game titles:


Mokalus of Borg

PS - Cool, isn't it?
PPS - It'll be interesting to see what other things they offer.

Communal amenities

What home services could be centralised? I think in a block of units (or a group of townhouses) it would be easy enough to fit one large air conditioning system for the whole building, and probably more efficient too. Same goes for hot water, in theory, though you might need internal hot water meters to divide that part of the electric bill fairly. I know some places have communal laundry rooms and when you get right down to cheap student housing you start getting shared bathrooms and lounges.

My point is that if we start overcrowding and also try to conserve energy and other resources, our current ideals of free-standing houses with private gardens and separate amenities is going to start looking pretty wasteful of both space and energy.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Most eco-house concepts still seem to be free-standing.
PPS - Green living in a society really wouldn't look like that.

Act different to think different

Rules inform behaviour; behaviour becomes habit; habit gets rationalised; rationalisations become attitude; attitudes become character. Usually we look to modify behaviour from the top down, changing our attitudes first, and hoping that the effect will flow down. The thing is that an attitude is a hard thing to change, especially when your actions aren't already backing it up.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My own attitudes change more easily in response to my actions.
PPS - You really should try it both ways and see what works.

Just another DRM failure

The HDCP master key has been leaked, which means anything that used to be "protected" by this pseudo-secret is now very vulnerable to attack, including Blu-Ray discs and HDMI cable connections. The point is this: the movie studios crammed HDCP down the collective throats of the electronics industry as yet another form of built-in failure, and now their critical secrets are out in the open and the whole scheme will come crashing down.

Did anyone predict this? Yes, in fact. Just about everyone, including security professionals, DRM nay-sayers and, I dare say, many people inside the MPAA itself. Next, will it matter if they were proven right and the DRM-happy higher-ups were dead wrong? You can pretty much bet on "no".

What will happen next? First, a mad scramble to try and suppress the secret key, which won't work. Next, investigations into key revocation, which won't work. Finally, someone will suggest generating a new key, essentially invalidating the old one and making all previously-sold equipment into incompatible paperweights. This might actually be the preferred approach, which will mean we'll start getting "Blu-Ray 2.0", and have to buy new TVs, new set-top boxes and new cables all over again.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - According to Hollywood, this will be known as "the price of piracy".
PPS - The rest of us will call it "highway robbery".

MMORPG Usability

It would be interesting to see someone do a software usability study on MMORPGs for new users. Coming from City of Heroes to World of Warcraft is quite a shock, given how casual-friendly CoH is. Anthony stated that WoW was actually a step up in usability for him, however, since his previous MMO was Final Fantasy XI which was very complicated.

I imagine, since most games are rather different, it would be hard to compare them to each other, but the elements they share in common could be tested, in theory. I imagine the most useful single number to boil down would be gameplay hours until decent proficiency, but since you can't directly define "proficiency" across games, it would be almost impossible to get such a number.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Personally, I think City of Heroes has a much nicer UI than WoW.
PPS - It's more helpful but still isn't intrusive.

iPod Prices per Gigabyte Then and Now

If they had kept making old versions of the iPod, how much would they cost now? The original iPod held 5GB and cost $399, making its cost $79.8/GB. The latest (mid-range) iPod Touch holds 32GB and costs $334 or $10.43/GB. So an original iPod at that cost per GB would now only set you back just $52. Conversely, an iPod Touch at the old per-gigabyte price would cost $2553.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I got the current iPod Touch price from JB HiFi.
PPS - And I may be comparing AUD to USD, but you get the idea.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Zombies caught on traffic camera

As an art project, Joe Sabia dressed up some people as zombies, arranged them around a red light traffic camera, then deliberately ran the red light to get the pictures delivered to him. It's kind of surreal.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Imagine that the camera is still faithfully doing its job after the zombie apocalypse takes over.
PPS - In that case, probably nobody would have to pay the fine.

Nokia Ovi Suite contact sync with Thunderbird

Tucked away in the update notes of Nokia Ovi Suite v2.2.1.23 is this: "Nokia Ovi Suite now supports syncing contacts with Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1". That's really significant for me, because the ability to sync my contacts with GMail is something I've been waiting for, and I know I can go via Thunderbird. I don't know yet whether it can sync calendars with Thunderbird, though.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Technically, I think that would be synchronising with the Lightning plugin.
PPS - And surely if they've done contact sync, they're aiming for calendars too.

Optical illusions on the road

Optical illusions have no place on the road. You might think it wouldn't enter anyone's mind, but apparently that's not the case. Some time ago there were trials conducted with painted speed bump illusions, and now a company called Preventable is running trials with a decal made to look like a child playing with a ball. These are bad ideas for two reasons. One, when drivers encounter them first, they draw undue attention from other driving tasks, potentially causing more accidents in the process. Second, once drivers get used to the illusions, they are trained to ignore them, which means they are less likely to pay attention to real road hazards, causing more accidents in the process.

In short, the upshot of optical illusions on the road is more accidents and more complacent drivers, which is the exact opposite of the intended effects. Ironically, it might be safer to put real people on the road in order to get drivers to slow down. At least they won't learn to ignore them.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Perhaps what we need is a dynamic speed-responsive hazard.
PPS - That is, one which reacts more strongly the faster you're going.

GMail Priority Inbox

GMail's new Priority Inbox feature is kind of neat. Despite the cheesy animated explanation, the idea is nice and solid, and the implementation pretty good too. Basically, it extends the built-in spam filter a level further to determine which of your incoming emails are the most important and which can wait for later (but aren't spam).

I was doing a similar thing with my work email a few years ago via Thunderbird's built-in spam filtering, and it was extremely effective. I look forward to the same results in my GMail account, but first I might have to disable a few of my filters - until now I was using them to hold back unimportant emails. Now if only Outlook could catch up and include features that are in all the other email clients.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I say "all the others", but I'm only thinking of GMail and Thunderbird.
PPS - Though I'm sure there are more that beat Outlook at certain tasks.

Homeopathic Cola

meopathic reasoning, wouldn't drinking water from an old cola bottle become more effective at keeping you awake as time goes on? The residue becomes more and more diluted as time goes on, so that should make it a more potent homeopathic remedy.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Homeopathic remedies have never produced greater effects than placebos.
PPS - But maybe sometimes that's enough to keep you awake.

Unpaid overtime should be illegal

It should be illegal not to pay workers for the overtime they work. Many bosses love to hold up workaholics as shining examples of the desired corporate culture. Basically if you're working a 70-hour week for a 40-hour wage, your boss will love you. And why shouldn't they? They're getting an extra 30 hours out of you, and all you ask in return is to be allowed to do it again next week.

I've written about this some time before, and how it amounts to slavery of a sort, but now I feel we need to go one better. We need to make sure it is illegal for companies to give you anything less than your full hourly rate for time you spend over and above your normal hours. Hopefully the least that will occur is that companies will start realising the diminishing returns they get from overworking people.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course it's hard to verify unsupervised work in some cases.
PPS - So there would be cheats, but there are cheats now, so how is that different?

Friday Zombie Blogging - Why a zombie outbreak would fail

Assuming a zombie outbreak managed to start at all, Cracked.com has a list of reasons it would fail quickly, including natural predators and the inability to heal themselves.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It makes sense.
PPS - But that doesn't make the prospect any less scary if real.

Consulting and short term gains

There's always a problem in consulting companies of short foresight. They'd rather you make money right now doing billable work rather than spending money now that will save three times as much in the future. And if you think you're waiting for a good time to do process improvement, you'll never get there. There's never an ideal time. Either saving future money is a priority or it's not.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Sometimes it's hard to figure out concrete return on investment numbers.
PPS - And sometimes even that doesn't help.

Water tanks and storm water drainage

Would water tanks on every home reduce the need for storm water drainage? Thinking about it briefly, it should mean that whatever water is running off the roofs of houses is being trapped in water tanks and not running down the street. Then again, you'd still need to account for the kind of storm that fills every tank to overflowing, which means you need full capacity.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And on the whole it's probably not worth taking into account.
PPS - It may become more relevant as time goes on.

Warm-weather skiing

I have a theory that we could bolt down some spongy netting to a mountain or ramp with an appropriate coating or sheath that would approximate the sensation of under-the-skis (or board) snow without requiring cold weather. Apparently they do this already, but you can't turn on it. To me, that's a pretty serious design flaw. To ski-jumpers, it's hardly noticeable.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm sure it comes in handy for them in their off-season training.
PPS - But even ski-jumpers have to turn at some point, don't they?

Forwards-compatible standards

Forward-compatible standards are the next step after getting everyone to implement interoperable industry standards. Actually, there might be a step between those that I'd call "open standards". Implementing any kind of standard is much better than relying on proprietary formats, and implementing open standards is better than that, because it fosters innovation and competition, leading to better products. Forward-compatible standards means that my set-top DVD player would be able to play Blu-Ray discs (though probably at lower resolution) if only the standards committee had designed for a bit of growth in the standard. I wouldn't have to keep upgrading my home entertainment systems if the standards were designed with a bit of forethought.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Forwards compatibility is a lot harder than it seems.
PPS - More so in hardware than in software, I think.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Zombies Win Court Case

About four years ago now, a group of people dressed up as zombies to protest mindless consumerism at a mall. They were arrested and jailed on the grounds that they possessed items resembling weapons of mass destruction (an iPod with speakers). Anyway, they've won their court battle against the city of Minneapolis.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There were only seven people in the group.
PPS - So I guess their protest didn't look very much like one.

Motion-capture actors

I think motion-capture actors should be called "puppeteers" because, in a very real way, they're moving a virtual puppet around. To apply terms like "virtual actor" to the combination of human and digital effect is a bit overblown, in my mind.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It does kind of broaden the definition of "puppet" though.
PPS - The world changes, though. Its words should change too.

Your computer doesn't care if you're angry

It surprises me just how quickly people lose patience with computers. The moment the extremely complex machine sitting on their desk goes even *slightly* wrong, it gets hit with a string of adjectives like "stupid", "useless", "frustrating", "annoying" and quite often growling too. I've learned to be more patient, quite simply because the computer doesn't care. It's not an entity that will respond to your anger, it's a box. Getting mad at it makes as much sense as railing at the traffic lights for being red. This is what they do. They were doing it before you got here and they will continue to do it obliviously after you leave. This is a problem or puzzle to solve, not a malicious imp that you can scare away. Cut your PC some slack, will you?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's like an artist blaming his canvas for being blank.
PPS - And it's about as helpful.

Train platform side announcements

Every day on the train I hear them announce what side of the train the platform will be on. Every time it's something like "platform will be on the right-hand side in the direction of travel". Now, there are a couple of terms already for the left- and right-hand sides in the direction of travel: port and starboard. People might not be quite familiar enough with them to get it right away, but I think they would catch on soon enough. What do you think?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If I were making the announcements, I might do it just for fun.
PPS - And then I'd probably "ARR!" like a pirate.

Paper note-taking will be here for a while

Paper note-taking and idea sketching is going to be around for a long time unless someone creates a system that can do just as well on computers. It will probably be on a tablet machine like the iPad, though it would likely work best where some kind of stylus is involved, for more natural drawing. Otherwise, trying to sketch things with a finger would feel more like trying to draw on a mirror with a sausage.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I frequently find myself with an idea I can't write out on computer.
PPS - The closest to paper is Paint, and that's just sad.

GMail and expired contact details

GMail has no notion of a retired email address. For instance, say a friend is changing jobs, so her work email is no longer valid. If I remove that address from her contact record, then anything she has ever sent me from work won't show up if I search for recent conversations with her. If I leave it there, it's polluting my contacts list with defunct addresses that I will never use again. The best solution I can think of is to rename it from "Work" to something like "DoNotUse". It's ugly, but it maintains the address association for historical records while reminding me that this is no longer a valid address (although it will only remind me when I look at my contacts, not when I type a name for an address).

What would be better, if GMail is going to hold all my email for all time, is to be able to mark email addresses (and perhaps other contact details?) as expired, while maintaining their association with contacts.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This might not come up if I didn't have six years of email in archive.
PPS - I'm pretty sure I've dissociated other addresses from their owners, losing email along the way.

Visual Studio Lightswitch

Having just written about a need for rapid database prototyping, along comes a beta version of something from Microsoft called Visual Studio Lightswitch. Now, it's not so much focused on model-based data prototyping, but it is configured for very fast data-driven application design and implementation. It's a great idea, though I'm not totally sure it belongs as a separate application. Perhaps the niche they're trying to fill is one step above Access but below fully-custom code.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is more like rapid user interface development for databases.
PPS - I assume the name is meant to imply the simplicity of switching on a light.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Sand is creepy

From the site Epic Win FTW, today's offering is a sand sculpture of zombies with tombstones. To me, it looks kind of like a zombie family portrait.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Say cheese!
PPS - Or maybe "say brains"?

Parking phone calls vs transferring

From what I've seen, "call parking" is more common and far easier to understand than call transfers on office phone systems. As long as the volume of transferred calls is small enough never to overflow the one or two "parked call" buttons, it's much easier to just park a call, call the forwarding extension, then explain that so-and-so is waiting on Park 1. This also has the advantage of allowing the forwarding party to pick up again if there is no answer, and for the call to wait a few seconds until the new recipient is ready. To see how much more intuitive it is, try drawing a diagram of call forwarding without using an extra location for the call that waits in limbo to be transferred.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In case you're not familiar, "parked" calls are just on hold.
PPS - And anyone can pick up.

Quickflix's good record with scratched discs

Recently I seemed to be getting more damaged discs from Quickflix, but rather than complain right away, I thought I'd look at the data. I loaded the website, copied my entire rental history and pasted it into a spreadsheet so I could see how many discs were damaged. Over the course of our membership, we have rented 334 discs. Of them, it seems only 7 have been damaged beyond watching, and every one was replaced. I know there were one or two that didn't get watched past the damaged portion, and at least once we sent back the damaged replacement and just rented the same title from Video Ezy. Still, 7 out of 334 is a pretty darn good record, and I'm glad I checked the data before making any emotional response. Keep up the good work, Quickflix!

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The most recent damage was Michael Moore's "Sicko".
PPS - I've sent it back twice now.

Model-based Database Prototyping

If there's one software project idea that keeps coming back to taunt me, it's this: rapid database prototyping. I got hooked on database modelling with a relatively obscure approach called Object Role Modelling. The industry standard is either creating database tables directly or Entity Relationship modelling, which is pretty much the same thing. My Big Idea is to use ORM to draw domain object relationships, then have the program transform it into mock-up database tables as well as prototype user interface code.

None of that is too groudbreaking, and you could do it fairly easily with existing tools. The next step is to modify the domain model and have the tools update the prototype code while retaining as much test data as possible. That's not so easy, but it's also not impossible. I could probably manage it with data dumps, new scripts and manually-written data migration, though I imagine that would get tedious. Given what exists already, perhaps all I need is an assistant tool for data migration between different database schemas.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If that makes any sense.
PPS - Data migration isn't so easy.

DVD rental by vending machine

Twice now I've seen DVD rental vending machines, so it seems high time I write about them. What's the business model? Clearly it's something between Quickflix (subscription-based, no late fees) and bricks-and-mortar (one-time costs plus late fees) where you get your movie and just pay for how long you keep it. I haven't seen anyone use them, so I don't know what kind of sleeves or cases the discs come in, though I'm betting on clear sleeves with some kind of barcodes.

The two different brands of machine also appear to have different strategies for getting your money: the first offers your first rental free, the second takes your credit card right away. In the long run, both would end up about the same income for owners. The last questions are things like quality. Are these discs more likely to be scratched and abused? What's your recourse if the disc is damaged when you get it? Do they come after you if you keep returning discs in scratched condition?

Personally I'm still waiting for the rather obvious business model of "burn on demand" for less-popular titles. Would it really be such a big hassle for a publisher to offer barebones DVDs burned on demand for those who want them? They might cost more, but the individual enthusiasts might be quite willing to pay more for their favourite niche-popularity movies.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Another thing: how many of each movie do they have available?
PPS - If they were burnt on demand, that wouldn't matter.

Cartooning memories to make them stick

I wonder if memories from your life would stick better if you cartoon them. It wouldn't take much, and I'm a pretty visual person, so I guess it would help. I wonder mostly because I remember The Simpsons more than my own life sometimes.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It may just be that I watched a lot of Simpsons in my life.
PPS - Over and over and over...

Friday Zombie Blogging - Pirates of the Caribbean 4

Johnny Depp claims Pirates of the Caribbean 4 will contain zombies of some kind. Not sure yet if this just means the same "zombies" from the first film or some new, actual zombie pirates. Wait and see, I guess.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The zombies from the first movie were more like "conveniently immortal".
PPS - That's what it seemed like to me.

Replacing street addresses

I wonder if street addresses are on the way out. GPS makes it easier to use satellite coordinates, and we'd avoid the problems currently cropping up where suburb boundaries shift and different systems have different maps. I know of a few places where most GPS maps think a street is in one suburb and the post office thinks it's in another.

Of course, both of those problems can be fixed by smarter search (that doesn't depend on an exact suburb match) and always-online maps, so we're more likely to see advancements in maps and search rather than wholesale replacement of the old system.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd love to have Google Maps built into my car stereo.
PPS - But that's another story.

Meh

Is "meh" an opinion or nothing? If it were no reaction at all, it wouldn't be audible, so it is a reaction of indifference. "I have noticed this and while it affected me enough to respond, it didn't make any other impact on me." So why respond that way actively when no response at all expresses your indifference even better? The only reason must be to make sure someone else knows that what they've said is a pointless waste of your time. That seems kind of harsh to me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Someone is sure to say "meh is just meh, you know?"
PPS - To them I say "meh".

Things not to do on a treadmill

I had a moment of extreme stupidity at the gym last night that I thought might amuse people. It's the kind of thing that could easily end up on YouTube, only I didn't fall down. Picture four treadmills side by side. I'm on the second and Deb is on the fourth. We're both moving, and Deb tries to hand me her rings for safe keeping, mine being the only pockets around. I try to reach across with my open hand, and one of the rings slips, tumbling back past me and off the treadmill.

My first reaction, as it would be if I were running outside, was to turn around to get it. On a treadmill, it turns out, that's not such a good idea. After a second or two of what I imagine now as "hilarious arm waving and backwards running in place" I manage to drop off the back of the treadmill, retrieve the ring and smile sheepishly at the horrified attendant. The only apology I can offer for my actions is "Wow, that was really stupid."

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I got back on another treadmill after shutting that thing off.
PPS - I imagine I've given the staff something to talk about too.

A scientific war dwarf

I was playing City of Villains with Deb and Anthony on Sunday night, and we were discussing an irregularity in one of my characters. Basically, he looks like a barbarian dwarf, with a war hammer and a shield, but he got his powers through a "Science" origin. We discussed as follows:

Anthony: "So why is your mace/shield barbarian guy is Science origin?"
Me: "I don't know. I haven't figured out his story."
A: "He bashes people on the head, for Science?"
M: "Perhaps he was accidentally brought to the present through some time-travel experiment."
A: "But that doesn't explain the origin of his powers, just his presence."
M: "His powers came through the experiment. With Science."
A: "Science is awesome."

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Science is awesome.
PPS - Especially if it can bring super-powered barbarian dwarfs into the present.

Dropbox incident

A few days ago, I manually reset one of my computers during a Dropbox update. What I didn't realise at the time was that it would cause files that were halfway downloaded to be subsequently uploaded in a corrupted state. Fortunately, three things allowed me to fix it: Dropbox has a previous versions restoration feature, the corrupted files were uploaded at zero size and I was able to write a program to search out empty files to manually restore. Crisis averted!

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've never been so thankful for backup before.
PPS - One of the affected files was my blog drafts backlog.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Plants vs Zombies update

Popcap's Plants vs Zombies, after some quiet complaints from the estate of Michael Jackson, have removed the Jackson "Thriller" parody zombie from the game and replaced it with a fairly generic disco zombie. I'm in two minds about the move. On the one hand, I understand that they want to be respectful and honour the wishes of those who represent Jackson now. On the other hand, he did kind of start it. Back in the 80s.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - PvZ is also now available on XBox Live Arcade.
PPS - I couldn't find the disco zombie update article again.

Sophistication and efficiency

Sophistication is inefficient. To settle the bill at a restaurant, if it's a classy place, I ask for the bill, the waiter brings it, I look it over and give them my credit card, they take it away and swipe it, then they come back with the receipt that I must sign, then they take it away again and we're done. All this for the privilege of not walking a few metres from the table. Doesn't seem like the best way to do things.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Unless your definition of "best" is "never mention money".
PPS - Or "never walk to complete a transaction".

The New Teaching

I've read and heard that old-school preaching and lecturing is out, in favour of participatory interactive dialogue. It does make sense that this is how people think, and it further makes sense to attempt to work with that if that's your audience. However, if your audience won't sit still for 30 minutes to get the hang of a deep idea, then only the shallow ideas can be conveyed. If your audience passes out from boredom after 30 seconds, our next generation won't know how to operate our nuclear power plants, build rockets or, for that matter, drive a car or bake a cake.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If it can't be learned in 30-second chunks, it can't be conveyed this way.
PPS - Most advanced skills and ideas fit that description.

In-store recipe database

At IGA on Sunday night I saw a touch-screen computer that intrigued me as I went past, so I brought Deb back for a look. It had categorised recipes you could browse, including images, and a facility to construct a shopping list for selected recipes, then print it out. The funny thing is that's almost exactly what Deb described to me as her ideal recipe database for home. I guess it makes a lot of sense that way.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - So I suppose now I have to duplicate that for home.
PPS - I doubt IGA would provide it for download.

Movie Prototyping

The extra features on the Meet the Robinsons DVD explained that, from the start of movie development, they storyboarded the entire thing, start to finish, and test-screened that "movie". That got me thinking about the comparisons between that approach and software prototyping. The sooner you get something in front of users, the better your feedback and the easier it is to change.

Movie prototyping wouldn't go quite like that, because they're different, but the approach has its hooks in me. The most positively-received parts of the movie get more work done, the least-popular parts get cut, then redo and rescreen. You'd get cheap feedback quickly and you'd know whether you're on a winner or not *before* you spend millions making the finished product. A dud might only cost you several thousand dollars, then gets discarded unfinished. If the movie industry is truly struggling to make money (they're not) then movie prototyping is exactly what they need to do.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You'd probably have to prototype the script along with the movie.
PPS - It would be a very different way to work.

Ideas vs execution

It's the execution of an idea, not the idea itself, that makes fiction compelling. If it were the originality of the idea, then a bad author handling a good idea would be far more entertaining than a good author with an ordinary idea. Similarly, no movies would ever be remade because the idea has already been done before (and there would be far fewer sequels too). The world would have only one love song, one painted portrait, one photograph of a sunrise and (blessedly) one romance novel if the only thing that mattered about art was unique ideas. But that's obviously not the case, because we are willing to go and see the "plucky ordinary hero defies the odds and brings down the arrogant, evil villains" movie over and over.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm pretty sure there would only be one episode of many TV shows, too.
PPS - Like Bewitched.

Friday Zombie Blogging - A confusing car crash

A group of people dressed as zombies got into a car crash. Their gore makeup greatly confused onlookers and led them to believe the crash was far more serious than it actually was.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - They could easily have had some fun with that.
PPS - Assuming they weren't actually injured, that is.

Practice makes imperfect

Why is practice looked down on? A singer who has had lessons is less respected than someone who is self-taught. A dancer who was never coached gets our raised-eyebrow nod of approval, but the one who worked hard at it for years gets the dismissive comments like "Yes, she's good, but she's had lessons." We seem to prefer raw talent even over that same talent honed by rehearsal.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I admit it's more impressive to be good at something without being taught.
PPS - But sometimes that gets carried a little further than it should.

How to address a stranger

How do you address a stranger? If it's a man, you call him "Sir". If it's a woman, you're out of luck. Say "Miss" and you offend the married ones, "Mrs" and you offend the unmarried ones. "Ms" is just weird and "Ma'am" offends just about everyone. The only other one I can think of is "M'Lady" which is too old-fashioned to be taken seriously.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Maybe we need something new.
PPS - Same as we need a gender-neutral impersonal pronoun.

Politicians and elections

We're coming up on an election in Australia, and I'm already more informed than usual about this one because I know the date more than a week in advance. But I want to know more from our potential representatives this time. I want to know why they want this particular servant position. I want to know what specific humility makes them perfect for the job. I suspect the only thing they have to tell me is that they are the alternative to that horrid person over there from the opposing party.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that elections make me feel simultaneously uninformed, antisocial and somewhat ashamed of humanity's lowest common denominator. But I really would like to know what they stand for (as opposed to what and who they stand against) and whether they are prepared to do what's right over what's popular.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've considered emailing the candidates.
PPS - But I rarely make it two sentences before it turns to berating.

Calendar privacy and synchronisation

I use my calendar extensively and for a very long time I have been synchronising it between my phone and Google Calendar via Outlook. It has a long history of events on it, some of them private. Now at work they would like me to share my calendar, mostly so they can check availability for meetings and things. This brings to light some deficiencies in the Outlook calendar sharing process.

First, my only options for sharing a calendar involve total secrecy or total access. There is no middle ground where people can see that I am busy but not with what. Second, I can't check my settings by seeing my own calendar through someone else's permissions before I apply them. That would prevent me exposing anything I'd rather keep private and would allow me to do so without inviting a co-worker to check out my calendar just to see if it worked.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My Google calendar is marked as private by default.
PPS - But that setting does not carry across to Outlook during synchronisation.

Centralised retail rewards

I wondered a while ago about fully-centralised retail reward programs. At the moment, at least in Australia, we have Fly Buys, Woolworths Select and any number of other loyalty and reward programs fragmented across the retail space. Each has its own card, its own count of reward points and its own catalogue. Wouldn't it be more convenient, I thought, to have just one program that every retailer joins? Then we could carry just one card, accumulate points much faster (since all purchases count towards that one program) and not have to worry about which retailer will give us points in which program. It would certainly be a big win for customers.

Then, of course, the other shoe dropped and I realised retailers wouldn't want that specifically because it removes any incentives of choice. There's no advantage in going to one place over another, so they'd have to compete on things like price and service. Ew.

So I thought a little further. What customers want is rewards points, as many and as fast as possible. What retailers want is money. What rewards programs want is data: shopping habits of the domesticated human. This can work for everyone, but it would require a change. If the one big rewards program paid retailers directly to collect the data, then everyone gets something they want, and the one rewards program can operate everywhere. The one question remaining is whether the rewards program can make more money selling shopping data than they have to pay to retailers to gather it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And, I suppose, whether money is worth more to retailers than the data.
PPS - Though there's nothing stopping them gathering their own data.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Zombie Fitness

Zombie Fit classes aim to get you fit enough to survive the zombie apocalypse. All gimmick, but probably fun.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - At first I thought "Zombie Fit" would be about rigor-mortis calisthenics.
PPS - Which don't really go together.

Surveillance and morality

Reading an interesting article on the effect on morality of surveillance, I start to get the point. Doing what's right because you fear being caught is still a moral loss: you would do it, but you are held back by intense self-interest. Conversely, wanting to do what's right is a moral win. With surveillance everywhere, our moral compass atrophies until all our actions are guided by fear of being caught - as the article says, we go on "moral auto-pilot". The end result, as I see it, would be people who don't even know what's right and wrong, so when faced with the choice in the absence of any surveillance will just choose at random or for greatest convenience. They're not doing wrong or doing right, they're just doing.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The mental image conjures up babies rather than psychopaths.
PPS - And that's the article's point: surveillance stunts our moral growth.

Gadget bag organisation with elastic-covered board

I find this idea, an elastic-covered board for in-bag gadget organisation, quite intriguing, though I don't have a lot of items in my bag that would benefit from this kind of organisation tool. And the price isn't bad, either. Still, it seems like exactly the kind of thing an enterprising Maker could put together with a little elastic, velcro, felt, foam and wood. Plus, the end result would be reconfigurable, which is a bonus. My guess, however, is that materials costs would outweigh the commercial version and then labour on top would make the DIY version a financial net loss. Still, an intriguing project.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The product is called "Grid It".
PPS - The commercial versions are only about $15.

Sick and singing don't mix

This week I got too sick to sing at church on Sunday, and it got me thinking. When I travel, I often get sick, and traveling and singing is pretty much what touring musicians do. So either they've got better infection control than me, or they know how to take better care of their voices. Probably a combination of the two. It's got to be a big deal for a singer to get sick on tour, because they don't exactly have an understudy they can send on for the night while they recover.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Deb suggests that they might just lip-sync for a while.
PPS - But those kinds of singers are probably doing that without being sick.

Windows screenshot procedure needs updating

Windows should be configurable to save screenshots automatically as image files rather than always copying directly to the clipboard. My reasoning is this: if you've ever taken a screenshot, what's the very first thing you did with it? Wait, let my psychic powers tell me: you opened up Paint and pasted the screenshot in so you could view it. If it was good enough, you saved it. Now tell me how different that is, functionally, from Windows saving the screenshot directly to a file (say, in a "My Pictures\Screenshots" folder) and you reviewing, editing or discarding them later. For very simple screenshots, taken many at a time, this would be just perfect.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm sure there are programs to do this.
PPS - But the point is to ask why it has to be a third-party program at all.

Harsh crime penalties

In Thailand, so my hearsay network informs me, if you park illegally, you get a $5000 fine ... and your car gets melted. There's very little illegal parking there. Similar harsh penalties apply in other Asia/Pacific nations noted for low crime rates. While you can't argue with results like that, there would be a few other issues to consider. One, are they always right when they melt a car? Two, is this power ever abused? Three, are basic human rights violated by these kinds of laws?

If you get your lips cut off for telling a dirty joke or your hand minced for thinking about stolen bread, what does that do to the general population and their state of mind? Somehow I doubt it's always clear-cut black and white about who is a criminal mastermind who deserves being hung upside down over a tank full of sharks with lasers attached to their heads and who is not.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It might also mean your police forces catch all the petty criminals but miss the organised crime bosses.
PPS - Maybe some governments are okay with that.

Friday Zombie Blogging - The Musical!

Zombie! The Musical! Enough said! More exclamation marks!

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This was a while ago now. It might not be playing any more.
PPS - There's still a YouTube behind the scenes clip, though.

Now with extra Science!

I've recently seen TV ads for acne cream that include the phrase "its advanced science helps blah blah" which makes me picture the packaging including a big bright starburst proclaiming "Contains Science!" I'd love to have stickers like that to put on, say, items at the supermarket or random things around town like telephone poles.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And especially my computer.
PPS - Unfortunately a search for "science cream" doesn't turn up anything interesting.

Every movie loses money

Apparently there have been a couple of court cases recently where it's been revealed how Hollywood companies cook their books and set up shell corporations so that the bottom line of every single movie is a net loss while the parent corporation remains filthy rich.

Basically it goes like this: every movie is made under a separate organisation, owned by the parent company. That individual movie company is charged enormous fees by the parent company so that the balance sheet comes out negative. At that point, the parent company disbands the small company, pockets the profits and tells a sob story to anyone who's entitled to a share.

Jurors aren't buying it because who would? Under even the most incompetent cross-examination it would have to come out that the parent company gets the money that was "lost" and both companies are one and the same.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Exploiting loopholes like that always looks crooked.
PPS - That's because it's evil.

How would Die Hard 4 actually play out?

I've just recently watched Die Hard 4.0 (also known in America as "Live Free or Die Hard") and I wonder what would happen if anyone actually managed to pull off such a "Fire Sale" internet take-over event. In all probability, in my mind, there would be anarchy for a while ... and then not. As these sad little kings sit on their sad little stolen electronic hill, a good proportion of the population would adapt, abandon electronic infrastructure and go back to semi-rural lifestyles. Let the tiny dictators have their irrelevant kingdom. The rest of us will be over here growing crops, trading handcrafts and ignoring you. Yes, life will be harder that way than it is today, but it would be harder still to cling to a digital lifestyle if it were run by an evil dictator. And if there's one thing humanity is good at, it's the path of least resistence.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course, for many people, the path of least resistence will be to kill and eat their neighbours.
PPS - So let's not try any of this today. Or tomorrow.

GMail and too-subtle links

I use GMail all the time, and I'm quite happy with it, aside from a couple of things. First, when I need to send email, it always takes me a few seconds to find the Compose link. It somehow gets buried with the labels and folders links on the left. The same goes for the Contacts link - always a few seconds of searching before I land on it. And I'm not stupid, nor am I an infrequent GMail user, as I said before. So how does a website I use every day manage to confuse me enough that I keep losing functions on the interface?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - All I seem to remember is that they're on the left.
PPS - Having blogged about it, I'll probably have cured myself.

Ramps vs stairs

Just a quick thought: ramps are fun, stairs are not. Ask any six-year-old. In fact, just about any method of getting from down here to up there is more fun than stairs. Explain that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My guess is that ramps offer more easy-going freedom.
PPS - On stairs, you step exactly this high. On ramps, you can run.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Chainsaw bayonet

This week's weapon of choice for the zombie apocalypse: a chainsaw "bayonet". Impractical, unwieldy, inconvenient and certainly not stealthy, yet somehow irresistible.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The video doesn't offer a very close-up view.
PPS - The chainsaw in this case seems to be electric.

MasterChef is the friendliest reality TV

Debbie recently observed that MasterChef seems to be more friendly among the contestants than other reality TV shows, and from what I've seen, I agree. My only theory is that it's because they don't vote each other off and there's no strategy besides being the best chef. Granted, not everyone will excel at every challenge, and sometimes they'll have bad days, but there's never any advantage in backstabbing or playing politics, so nobody bothers. It's refreshing.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or maybe cooking attracts a better class of person.
PPS - Could be both.

Human billboards

Recently I've seen people walking around with "billboard backpacks", occasionally handing out flyers or business cards for local businesses. The billboards are about as wide as their shoulders and extend about that same distance over their heads. I want to ask those people if they feel demeaned being turned into a walking billboard. It can't be much fun to draw attention to yourself that way purely for the sake of a business. I suspect most of them are backpackers taking temporary gigs for the sake of a few extra dollars.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I also want to ask them if they fall over in strong winds.
PPS - That would be just one safety hazard of carrying a sail on your back.

Simulating high-speed cameras

Could multiple cameras running at high speed be used together to produce an even higher frame rate? They'd have to be properly synchronised, and preferably placed close together, but I think it should be possible. If we assume that, what's the limit? How fast a camera can we simulate by adding more synchronised high-speed cameras into the mix? Do you need a synchronisation program as fast as your intended combined frame rate, or can you make do with random differences between cameras? If it's possible, you wouldn't need to design a single camera to run at 1000fps, but could make do with two or three cheaper ones running at much lower (and more attainable) frame rates.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't think I have a need for very high frame rate cameras.
PPS - Few people would, I suppose.

The Pumpkin Scone Conspiracy

Over the weekend was my birthday, and one of the foods I really enjoy are pumpkin scones. Now, although pumpkin scone recipes are not hard to come by, good recipes seem to be few and far between, if you can find them at all. Debbie and Beth made pumpkin scones for me that were superb fresh out of the oven, but they had to tweak the recipe to make it work properly. The conclusion we all reached, between bites of hot buttered scones, is that all the little-old-lady recipes have been sabotaged in some way, misreporting an amount of one ingredient, overstating the cooking time or some other fudge-factor, and all this in order to make sure "nobody makes scones quite as good as Mrs Whoever". Just think about that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It may not be a coordinated conspiracy, but that doesn't make it unreal.
PPS - One day we may weep for the lost knowledge of scone-baking.

Debit Visa/Mastercard and undesirable fees

Some retailers have (reportedly) stopped accepting Visa Debit cards (and presumably Debit Mastercard too) because the fees make it an undesirable prospect for a retailer to accept such things. I wasn't aware that the fees were so different between credit and debit cards, but it makes sense for retailers to refuse them in that case. They don't have to pay high fees to financial institutions just to make their customers happy, but it's kind of in their best interests. What's in Visa and Mastercard's best interests, however, is to make the style of card a non-issue to retailers, mostly because their advertising and whole concept for these cards is to use your own money where credit is usually the only option. If big retailers stop accepting them, then slogans like "Accepted everywhere Visa is" have to be dropped, and suddenly the appeal to consumers is lost too.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's a good idea that just needs a little work.
PPS - Woolworths, contrary to some reports, still accepts these cards.

Friday Zombie Blogging - BZW2010

Brisbane Zombie Walk 2010 is ON! Sometime in October, everyone who's willing and able will be taking to the streets of Brisbane cleverly disguised as the walking dead. I should go again this year.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Last year they set a world record.
PPS - I think that record has since been broken.

Technology: You're Doing It Wrong

Technology is meant to be a tool to enrich our lives and enable us to do more with less. Instead, too often we enjoy technology for its own sake, and embrace anything new not because it will help us but because it is new. Then we unconsciously use it to isolate ourselves instead of connecting. What do you actually want to do with Twitter and why? Same with Facebook. Rather than switch it all off, though, question yourself before you use it each time: is it enabling me or isolating me?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm pretty sure I started this blog just because it was cool at the time.
PPS - And I joined Facebook because a critical mass of my friends did.

Apple vs freedom and how it works for you

The obvious advantage of Apple controlling everything you can and can't do with your phone, plus being the only manufacturer of hardware and software is that the idea of "system requirements" for apps can be reduced to a handset or OS version number in the worst possible scenario. In the Android space, different phones have different capabilities so it can be harder to determine if a particular app is going to run on your phone or not. At that point you get into the realm of real system requirements and possibly compatibility checkers, and by then most users will throw up their hands in confusion and go buy an iPhone.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Again I go on about the iPhone.
PPS - You know I'll end up with one eventually.

Music technology for portability

With electronics ever-improving, the portability of what could be called a musical instrument will only increase. I saw someone on the train playing the drums with his thumbs on his iPod Touch. We can play Guitar Hero on our Nintendo DS consoles and if you use the right software, any laptop is a sythesiser. I also glimpsed an ad for a "Paper Jamz" electronic toy guitar that I guess is comparable in weight and thickness to cardboard.

So sometime in the not-too-distant future, I expect it will be possible to carry a guitar, piano or almost anything just about anywhere, folded up small enough to fit into a pocket, and wirelessly connected to a media player for sound output. It won't be exactly like traditional instruments, but that is never the point with new technology.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Now if only I knew how to play anything.
PPS - None of my self-teaching experiments ever got far.

Skin care science

Either skin science has been progressing rapidly and consistently for decades or they're lying to us. Every couple of months there is a "new revolutionary breakthrough in the fight against aging", but what actually changes? Are the creams, lotions and moisturisers you use today that much better than what you had a year ago? Five years? How about what your mother used? I call shennanigans on the whole industry.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If every breakthrough was truly so, today's skin care would be orders of magnitude more impressive than in the past.
PPS - That's not to say there aren't good products, but not every one of them can be "revolutionary".

Six Degrees of Joss Whedon

Nathan Fillion played Malcolm Reynolds on Firefly and also Caleb the priest on Buffy.
David Boreanaz played the vampire Angel on Buffy and then on the spin-off Angel.
Gina Torres played Jasmine on Angel as well as Zoë Washburne on Firefly.
Alan Tudyk played Hoban Washburne on Firefly and appears in Dollhouse as Stephen Kepler.
Eliza Dushku plays Echo on Dollhouse and also rogue slayer Faith on Buffy.
Charisma Carpenter played Cordelia Chase on Buffy as well as on Angel.
Amy Acker played Winnifred Burkle on Angel, then Dr Claire Saunders on Dollhouse.

It just goes on like this.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not sure there's anyone who's been in every one of Joss Whedon's shows.
PPS - I tried to stick with characters who actually encountered each other.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Zombie Dice

Demonstrated at PAX East this year was Zombie Dice, a quick, simple and sounds-like-fun game involving rolling dice for figurative brains. First to 13 points wins, but you only get your points if you roll less than three shotgun blasts before you declare your turn over.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You could play a similar game with home-made equipment, I'm sure.
PPS - But it would be better if the dice came up "brains" rather than "three".

Club Train

I think it would be kind of cool to set up a Club Train that starts at Central, runs a loop and heads off again. You could serve drinks and have music and lights, plus big soft couches along the sides of the carriage to sit in. The biggest problems, I suppose, would be getting people drunk and allowing them not only to try and dance in a moving vehicle but navigate on and off a train during the night. Still, I kind of like the idea. It's the sort of thing I imagine when I'm on a crowded train heading home in the evening.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Imagine seeing that thing go doof-doofing past your station.
PPS - There are problems with the idea, but it's a fun thought.

Facebook is a worry and a chore

Sometimes I find Facebook a chore, and sometimes it just seems like a bad place to be. For instance, there are things I might want to share on Facebook that aren't appropriate for people outside my family, and while I know I can set up the privacy settings and things like that, it's just more of a hassle than doing nothing. Sometimes I think my friends who have fewer people in their lists on Facebook have the right idea: limit yourself to those people who you want to share EVERYTHING with. Then there's never a question of whether or not you should post that photo or make that update. But then there are people who I want to remain connected to, but don't want to share absolutely everything with. In the end, it's just easier to keep things off Facebook than put them up, because keeping them private afterwards is too hard.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I like being on Facebook.
PPS - There are just some times when I wish it was different.

Managing anticipation

It can be difficult to manage a level of anticipation and excitement until an event. If you focus too much on one event, your time perception slows to a crawl and you get exhausted. If you try to ignore it to maximise your enjoyment as a new experience, you risk not being excited enough when the time comes, dulling your enjoyment.

For instance, I'm anticipating Portal 2 next year, and I'm keen to find out what it feel like to play, I also know that if I build it up too much it's going to be disappointing. Nevertheless, the gameplay and environmental videos I've seen so far make it look very interesting and probably a lot more complicated and difficult than the first one.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I saw someone once who was let down by a new font.
PPS - Granted, he was a typeface nerd, but still. Disappointed by over-anticipation.

Hotmail attachments

Hotmail (or "Windows Live Hotmail" to give its full marketese name) has rolled out some changes recently to the way it handles attachments. Instead of moving copies of copies of files around the web and clogging up its own servers, Hotmail now stores attachments in Skydrive ("Windows Live Skydrive") and sends just links in emails. What this means for Average Joe is pretty much nothing - it's going to work about the same as before.

What it means for Microsoft, however, is that it doesn't need to store twenty copies of every image that gets sent to twenty Hotmail users who receive the same email. That means less work and faster responses plus less disk usage on the servers. It might also mean forcing more users to sign up for Skydrive who receive emails from Hotmail users at accounts with other providers. In other words and in summary, it's a decent engineering solution with a very Microsofty catch.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I may be pleasantly surprised if signing up to Skydrive is not needed.
PPS - And, really, it could go either way.

Guitar Hero as music notation

I wonder if kids growing up with games like Guitar Hero will expect a new and different form of written music when they come to learn real instruments. Maybe the "roadway" real-time view might come to replace traditional sheet music entirely for some instruments. Instead of sitting down with a paper book, you'd sit with an iPad or a computer screen to display the notes and timing.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then again, displaying real, full musical scores like that might be a bit much.
PPS - Someone has probably already tried.

Friday Zombie Blogging - How not to survive

This week I present Cracked.com's guide to zombie survival tactics that will get you killed, though I think getting in that situation is not exactly a ticket to long life and happiness. Then, as a bonus, a guide to how iconic movie heroes would handle a zombie invasion.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There seem to be a few odd "survives" predictions in that last list.
PPS - But since we're talking movie heroes and zombies, realism might have already left the building.