Home sleep labs

You know sleep labs, where people come to be studied for sleep disorders? Couldn't you give people a recording box and some electrodes or sensors to do those sleep tests in their own homes and beds? It seems odd that there tests can only be done in a lab where people won't sleep normally anyway. I can't help but think that must be skewing the results.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've never had to go myself.
PPS - Although I do snore.

Driving cabs by remote

What if you could outfit a fleet of taxis to be driven by remote over the internet? You could outsource your taxi driving workforce to India without importing any people. Or perhaps this would work better as a driver hire service for your own car, until someone takes it for a virtual joyride and the extradition rules aren't clear. And the network connection would have to be pretty reliable, too. But apart from those major deal-breaking issues, not a bad idea, eh?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wouldn't get in the spooky, driverless cab, ever.
PPS - Well, maybe on a dare.

Cameras on desktop computers

Cameras are so common that it's almost impossible to buy a laptop or phone without one. On a desktop machine, it's still a third party extra. Why is that? Cost? How much more does it cost to put a camera in a phone? Low demand? There are a lot more people on Skype now, so demand should be rising. Customisation? If we build cameras into monitors, but you want a better one, you could always buy one.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Those are the only objections I can come up with.
PPS - I'm sure I could find a monitor with a camera if I looked hard enough.

Defending against mistakes

I saw a story on some current affairs show about someone who had mistyped a number on an electronic bank transfer and sent money to the wrong account. It was a significant amount of money, and the question was immediately raised: why don't the banks defend against this kind of mistake? The reason is that it's impossible to tell intent from that action.

If I meant to send money to my Uncle Bob for the first time, but I hit the wrong number and get AAA Pottery Supplies instead, how can that look accidental to the bank? I might have bought something from them and need to make a transfer, besides which they don't know Uncle Bob is my uncle or that I meant the transfer to go to him. Furthermore, I don't think the banks can even get names to associate with accounts from other institutions, and if they were able, they shouldn't, because that makes confirming (or brute-force guessing) account details much simpler.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The only thing you could do is extra chances for manual checking.
PPS - But those quickly become automatically skipped.

A Mickey Mouse Operation

When you want to say that a company is small-time, you can say they're "a Mickey Mouse operation". I'm not entirely sure when that saying started, but it makes absolutely no sense any more. Mickey represents one of the biggest media and entertainment companies in the world. They own four amusement parks and enough lawyers and lobbyists to change United States copyright law as if it exists only for them. They have revenue of billions a year - after tax. They could probably buy an entire state and set it up as their own sovereign country. A Mickey Mouse Operation should conjure up images of world-eating corporate machines, not two guys in a shed.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - People don't say it much anymore, I suppose.
PPS - Not my generation, anyway.

Semi-communal living

I wrote something in passing about how individual houses could be replaced by one big aircraft hangar to house whole communities where everyone stakes out their own little area proportional to how much they pay for upkeep. The more I thought about it, the more it started making a lot of sense as something between wasteful individual houses and hippy communes. You might still have to keep communal plumbing and lighting, but that's bound to be more energy and water efficient than individual houses anyway. So what do you think? Could you live in a small, private, secured area of an aircraft hangar, sharing plumbing with a few hundred other people if it meant lowering your environmental impact and relying on the superstructure for a roof over your head?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not totally sure how I'd handle it.
PPS - Once I got over feeling a little bit homeless, that is.

Always-on video phones

The next step from always-on internet is always-on video conferencing. For instance, a family dispersed across the globe could set up video conferencing always-on in alcoves that look like windows. Then it would look like you're living in one house with a few connecting portals. The oddest thing about it would be time zone differences making it look like it's night in the next room when here is bright daylight.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also, as the size of your family increases, so does the screen space required.
PPS - And the bandwidth.

Curving a bullet

Would a bullet curve if it were round and had a side spin and low velocity? Mythbusters tested the bullet curve idea from the movie Wanted and found it to be untrue (of course). What I'd like to know, however, is whether they gave up too soon. See, soccer balls curve in the air all the time. All it takes is side spin to set up a "Magnus effect". So if you want to curve a bullet, perhaps what you need, rather than unbalanced projectiles or fancy gunplay is a low-velocity, spherical projectile with high drag coefficient spinning sideways.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't have access to such things myself.
PPS - Nor a place to test it, if I did.

Friday Photo - Gecko Hitching

See those feet and tail poking out there? That's a gecko under my windscreen wiper who hitched a ride home with us from the movies. It's about a 17km drive, taking 20 minutes, and most of that time he was clutching onto the lower corner of the windscreen. We only noticed him when we were halfway home.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Those feet are great at gripping.
PPS - So great, in fact, they copied the design to make tape.

WordLens

WordLens is an obvious next step in Augmented Reality and Machine Translation. It translates between English and Spanish (though obviously other languages could follow) by pointing your phone camera at written text and it overlays the translation in place, as if the world were changing to match your native language. And it does so without a network connection. It might not be perfect yet, but it's a great idea and improvements are sure to follow.



Mokalus of Borg

PS - My nightmare scenario for AR is an app that removes clothing from strangers.
PPS - But I suspect that could be beaten with anti-image-recognition fashion.

Reevaluating my blogging procedures

Until now, I have been keeping my blog post drafts in a text file, and selecting my next post from the end, representing the most recent entries, since they're likely to be the most relevant. However, the drafts file has been growing and growing, and I feel like I've been a bit lazy about posting quality. My best work may be lurking in the middle of the file where I'll never see it again.

Enter the Comparator. Now I have written a program to present me with the entire backlog of post drafts, two at a time, and I vote for the one I like best of each pair. The scores are saved, the file sorted and rewritten. Now the best posts will gradually float to the end of the file and the worst ones will sink to the beginning, making this a win in a few ways. I should be posting better quality entries here while saving space removing the worst from the drafts file, and I'm much less likely to overlook a high-quality draft. The first few sortings will take quite some time for me, but after a while, I will start to see much more clearly the difference between my best and worst work.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - So far, I've only made one voting pass.
PPS - But it already looks like it's doing a good job.

Future internet services

It seems likely that Microsoft will push more to online services as its standard business model, in part to prevent piracy, but also to allow users access to their own standard home computing environment from anywhere. Imagine being able to log in to any Windows PC, anywhere worldwide, and seeing your own familiar environment, hosted at Microsoft, with your email, browser bookmarks and personal files right there as if you were at home. You pay a yearly subscription fee, plus a monthly fee depending on how much storage you're using. That's "software as a service", and they're big on that.

The Big Three in IT (Google, Microsoft and Apple) will continue to be big, but their core business will be more about servers and services available anywhere. Client software will continue to be important, but will focus on two areas: using the Big Three services to provide value, or doing without the Big Three entirely, working in a serverless, peer-to-peer network fashion.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It will be interesting to see how the internet develops.
PPS - I think there's a lot of changes ahead.

The cost of moving Wicked tickets

The show Wicked at QPAC was forced to displace 40 000 tickets in response to the Brisbane floods. That means 40 000 phone calls to make to patrons who may want to reschedule or may want to get a refund. Let's say it takes an average of 20 minutes to make each of those phone calls, and say they can have people working on it, non-stop, for 8 hours per day, 5 days per week. That's only 120 calls per worker per week.

To get through all the calls in a reasonable time of two weeks, they'd need 334 people working full-time. If you're paying them $20/hour, that's $534 400 just in wages, not counting phone call costs, administration and office rental that you'd obviously need for your brand new 334-strong dedicated call centre. So if they can afford to spend that much on rescheduling tickets, imagine how much they're making by putting on the show.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There may be fewer than 40 000 people to contact, due to group or pair bookings.
PPS - It's funny that a show about the Wicked Witch of the West was damaged by water...

Digital sound

Our current methods for digital sound reproduction go something like this: digital sound signal is translated to analogue to travel down a wire to analogue speakers that produce the sound. This can result in a loss of quality, particularly if the cable is less than perfect. I notice that effect very often with my computer speakers. You need to ensure a good connection between all the components or you get further signal degradation, and the first thing you check when your sound is bad is the cable connections.

To maintain quality and minimise these effects, we need to push the digital-to-analogue conversion to be as late as possible. In this case, that means right up in the speakers, headphones or earbuds. The cables and connections need to carry digital signals so that even cheap cables can guard against signal loss quite effectively (just like all HDMI cables produce a perfect picture, no matter the price).

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This will make headphones and speakers more expensive, unfortunately.
PPS - It will also make a lot of equipment obsolete or at least incompatible.

Friday Photo - The Ashes

This is a replica of the Ashes, the smallest professional sporting trophy in the world. You can't quite tell the scale, but it's only about a handspan tall. This particular replica is owned by my Dad, who is fond of telling the story of its origin, and simultaneously dismayed that other Australia vs England sporting events call themselves "the Ashes" too.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I know it's not the official trophy of the competition.
PPS - But the official trophies now given are the same size.

Blurring the truth

We will get more access to information in the future but the truth will get harder to determine. We publish lies as jokes, where the only way to know the difference is to know the truth already. But once we've had a few generations of this, how is anyong going to dig up the truth about the past any more?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The answer is not "check it on Wikipedia".
PPS - Also, you can't easily fact-check a vague rumour.

Phone calls don't multitask well

The disadvantage of using our phones for everything is that you can't do anything else while on a call, like take a note or look up a map. And with our world rapidly converging to a place where our primary computing device is in our pocket all the time, this is going to be a problem. Maybe not a very big one, but a problem all the same. The only solution for now seems to be putting your phone on speaker and multitasking. I wonder if we can come up with anything better.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Probably not.
PPS - Unless it involves relying more on text-based communications.

I Am, You Are, We Are Australian

Today is Australia Day, and I think, as a nation, we still aren't sure what it means to be Australian. It might have something to do with dying in a war on a beach, or it might be all about sport, alcohol and cooking outdoors. People might throw around words like "larrikin" and "underdog", too, but I still don't think we're closer to really defining our national identity.

Maybe one of these days we'll get it clear, but for now I think it's better that we have just a vague stereotype. I'm Australian and you're Australian, and the different ways we express that is how we make up this nation. That way we don't define Australia by what we should be, but what we currently are, and there's nothing to point at and say "this is Australian, and you are not". It's inclusive. I like that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That's what "multiculturalism" is supposed to be, right?
PPS - That was never clearly defined either, but that's what I think.

Mozilla disabling Skype Firefox extension

I've heard that Mozilla have decided to flip the kill bit on the Skype toolbar, an extension for Firefox that is always installed with Skype (whether you want it or not), uses tons of resources and is the cause of an absurd percentage of all Firefox crashes. It makes good sense, since force-installed extensions that reduce stability of Firefox will give the impression that Firefox is bad, where the actual reason is that Skype blows big chunks. Is it a concern? Do people actually want or need this buggy extension? Probably not. Even if you do, you can manually re-enable it, but I think Mozilla have made the right choice in this.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Now if only they would make it impossible to install third-party extensions permanently against my will.
PPS - I'm looking at you, Java.

Wotif.com and usability

I have discovered something frustrating about Wotif.com. If you know approximately where you want to stay, and exactly when, you can't easily search for that. You can get a list of accommodation around that area, available or not, and you can get a list of accommodation including availability, but what you can't get is a search including only what's available in a certain region on a certain date. The map includes everything and the list doesn't tell you where things are like the map does. As soon as you zoom in or out on the map, the speech bubble pointing to your selection disappears, so you can't see where it is in relation to other places unless you keep your eyes glued on it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If the short list function affected the map too, that would work.
PPS - It still wouldn't be perfect, though.

Friday Photo - Panic Buying

Pictured above is the milk section at a local supermarket during the worst of the Queensland flood panic. I suppose people were just too polite to take the last one?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I didn't need it, so I didn't buy it either.
PPS - The fruit and vegetable section looked similarly empty.

Dangerous driving

One thing that gets us all into trouble on the roads is cutting in to a gap that's too small for us. The reason I think it's particularly dangerous is that the drivers closing the gap slow down to avoid killing you. This may lead you to believe you judged the gap just right, and pull into similar gaps in the future where drivers are not being as alert or courteous. You'll never know they slowed down. My own response, which is even more dangerous, has been to maintain speed a little bit longer to give the clear impression that the gap you pulled into was too small. It's a bad idea, and I don't do that any more.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm sure there are plenty of dangerous, stupid things done on the roads daily.
PPS - And not all of them in cars.

Human responsibilities

Human rights need to be balanced with human responsibilities. You never have one without the other. Lately, though, our society has been vastly over-emphasising human rights, asking us to be greedy, needy, selfish imps, taking and never giving. The world owes me these things, and I demand them right now. And what do I do in return? I exercise my rights. Give them to me and I will use them. End of story.

I'm not saying fighting for human rights is a bad thing, nor am I saying that the idea needs to be abandoned. And goodness knows there are plenty of places in the world that really need someone to fight for the human rights of their populace. But once we've got our rights, we need to move forward to mature responsibility too. You don't have rights in a pure vacuum. You have rights as long as you uphold their associated responsibilities, and your responsibilities persist as long as you benefit from your rights. They're two sides of the same story.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I do think the rights need to come first.
PPS - And the first responsibility is to fight for others' rights.

Protecting discarded hard drives

Sometimes I worry about the advice I give out. Being "one of the computer guys" means I get queries about all aspects of all technology, and it's important to understand what is actually being requested. The most recent one was about how to "get data off a dead hard drive". The request was actually about how to prevent someone reading a hard drive that is intended to be discarded, so I recommended blunt force trauma (hit it with a hammer until "the round bits inside" are broken). Having never done such a thing myself, I actually don't know if that will produce inpleasant side-effects like deadly shards of flying metal, but it's what I would do.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or at least what I would try the first time.
PPS - The second time might involve something more careful.

The Sci Fi Channel changed its name to "Syfy". Everyone hated it. Many people insist on pronouncing it "Siffy" to make fun of it. They have also announced their intention to produce more reality shows and push away from science fiction. Everyone hates the idea. However, if the ratings indicate that they get higher viewership this way, they will keep moving away from their "traditional" programming until they are a hyperactive MTV clone.

What those numbers will not indicate, however, is the large body of disenfranchised science fiction fans who are now ripe for the plucking by some other science fiction channel. When you alienate your core audience and replace them with ADHD tweenies, of whom there are more, your raw numbers will go up, but you'll push into an occupied niche, vacating one that was all your own. It looks good on paper, but it would look better on paper if you had started your ADHD channel as well as the science fiction one, since the audiences don't overlap that much.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's a problem of not looking deep enough into the statistics.
PPS - Ratings aren't deep enough at all, but advertisers don't much care.

Superheroes and the police

There are a bunch of guys who dress up as super heroes in Seattle, complete with masks, and go on patrol to fight crime. Leaving aside the question of their sanity for a moment, what's wrong with this picture? We have an organisation designed to fight crime. It's called "The Police Force". And if you want to be a crime fighter, they have a very clear application process you can go through. They'll even issue you with:

• A costume
• Cool gadgets
• A vehicle
• A base of operations
• Special training
• A sidekick and
• A whole team of like-minded crime fighters to back you up

That's practically a recipe for becoming Batman. If you go out on your own in a mask, no matter how awesome you think you are, you're not invincible. You don't have the proper training or the right equipment, and at some point you'll either get charged with assault or murdered. You'll do just as much good (some would argue more good) as a police officer than as a masked vigilante.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Go and join up.
PPS - If you don't make it there, you're probably not cut out for the gig anyway.

Friday Photo - The lake behind my house

My home city of Brisbane has been flooding over the past few days. The picture above is the lake behind my house on Tuesday, which is usually a park. That red stick is about a metre tall, standing beside a concrete path. It was this sight that led us to self-evacuate for Tuesday night. Thankfully, no damage was done to our property or any of our neighbours, and the water has receded significantly since then.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The water was a good 50 metres from our house.
PPS - We're the lucky ones.

Incurable bad breath

I suffer from bad breath. I think I got it from my Dad, and I have it nearly all the time. If I haven't brushed my teeth in the last few hours, my breath smells like a toilet. The most frustrating part of the whole experience for me is that there is no way to cure this condition. The best you can do is cover it up and hope nobody notices. While I realise that bad breath is probably an invention of people who wanted to sell us scented toothpaste, mouthwash and chewing gum, that doesn't help me when I live in a culture that values smelling nice over actual bodily cleanliness. Now if you'll excuse me, it's been a good three minutes since I last chewed some gum and the house plants are starting to wither.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Nobody seems to know what causes chronic halitosis.
PPS - Or at least the people who claim to know are inconsistent.

Flooding and communication

The floods in Brisbane over the past couple of days have made me realise that it's pretty difficult to get real information about vulnerable areas and predicted levels of flooding. For instance, depending on what sources you listen to and what their mood is, you might hear about at-risk areas in terms of "regions", suburbs, catchments, rivers, altitude (ie "low-lying areas"), bridges or roads. If you want to know whether you're in danger, you need to know all of these things about your local area.

Second, up to date flood maps are very useful, as long as they are clear. The only map I could find of my area had thin blue lines for all creeks, rivers and overland flows, and thick, unlabelled grey lines for every road. That made it nearly impossible to tell what areas were at risk and which were flooded.

So what should have been done differently? The Bureau of Meteorology, city council and emergency services need to coordinate their information better and provide simple, consistent, easy-to-access lists of contact information and maps of flooding and at risk areas. Simply talking about "low-lying areas" of particular suburbs isn't good enough. Also, if you say on the radio that "information will be available on our website", you'd better put it prominently on the front page.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - On the plus side, if you wanted shocking video, the TV had that covered.
PPS - But never any location captions.

Online parking reservations

I wonder whether any parking buildings provide online reservation systems. You'd go online, print a reservation slip, then rock up and scan it to be let in. They'd have to be prepaid and have an expiry time, though, or else be for a specific vehicle. Otherwise you'd get scalpers standing at the gates overcharging for their acquisitions.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In general, it seems like a system that would work.
PPS - Maybe not in every case, but it would function.

Rechoreographing failed dance auditions

You know what I would like to see? A dance show that takes the awkward self-choreographed routines of failed auditions and reinterprets them as they must imagine they look. So instead of just playing these cringe-worthy auditions, someone spends the time studying them to figure out what was the intended look, then performs the polished version. Granted, amateur dancer/choreographers won't match up to professionals, so the end result may still be a bit off, but I just want to see what these people think they look like.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Some of it might come out well.
PPS - But by then it might not look much like the original.

LoseIt and converting measurements

I've started using a website called LoseIt to help lose a little weight by tracking my food intake. It's just calorie counting, so nothing revolutionary there, and all the measurements are in imperial units like fluid ounces and pounds. I looked for an option to switch to SI units and instead found an FAQ entry that states why the site is limited to the old system. The claim is that this is because of the database storing information in imperial units, but that makes no sense. After all, can't computers multiply and convert between units after they're retrieved from the database? I could write all the necessary conversions in a single afternoon and probably in a single hour.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Adding such conversions to their software would take longer.
PPS - I'm sure I could do it.

Friday Photo - This Is Jacob

Here's something new I'm going to try this year instead of Friday Zombie Blogging: a photo every Friday. Above is the Secret Santa gift I received at the office Christmas party. It's a Twilight Jacob doll, and I managed to sell it to a coworker as a gag gift for $10.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - So, really, I got $10 from Secret Santa.
PPS - I bought a muffin with it.

Terrorism vs journalism

I've heard Wikileaks branded as "an act of terrorism" because it's a threat and induces fear. But isn't terrorism meant to be defined as a fear-inducing act for the purpose of waging war and destroying a culture? Journalism, on the other hand, is an act that can induce fear, but is intended to preserve a culture by revealing illegal acts done by people in power. The threat of revelation is meant to keep those people from abusing their power or, if it's too late, to take their abused power away. We have freedom of the press to counterbalance the corrupting effects of power.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Every king needs a fool to make fun of him.
PPS - And that fool needs to be free to do so.

Do not pay more for premium HDMI cables

You should never, ever pay more for a "high quality" HDMI cable. Here's why. In the days of analogue signals, high-quality cables made a difference. A shoddy cable might introduce a certain amount of noise into the signal, delivering only, say, 80% quality. That 20% signal loss would translate directly to poorer audio or video, because there's less signal to work with.

HDMI, however, delivers a digital signal, which can stand up to 49% signal degradation with no loss of quality whatsoever. So while a high-quality cable might manage 99% signal fidelity, and a cheap cable only 60%, these two cables will sound and look identical in the end. The only difference will be the amount of cash left in your wallet.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The difference between digital and analogue is no contest.
PPS - As you'd know if you've compared them.

Multi-touch desk computers and real users

A recent study at Aachen University created a single-display multi-touch desk intended as one big, smooth work surface. They called it BendDesk. When tested with real users, however, they used the horizontal and vertical surfaces much as we currently use screens, mouse and keyboard - they treated them as separate planes and avoided the curved, connecting section like it was diseased.

Personally, if I had a desk like that, I'd be more likely to do my work on the horizontal surface, like a normal desk. Something else I'd like to see someone try is a tilted surface, like an architect's desk. I think that might turn out to be even better for large-screen multi-touch computers.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I think the results indicate current habits more than fundamental psychology.
PPS - Maybe that's just me, though.

GMail spam filter adjustments

I used to keep my spam folder in GMail turning over automatically, just allowing items to expire as they reached their 30-day limit, then it seemed everything got a lot worse and my spam volume jumped from 20 per month to over 50. It held there for a really long time, and I got sick of marking things as read every day (to keep the unread message count invisible) so I just deleted the lot one day. Suddenly, the volume of new messages dropped, so I can't help but think GMail bases its minimum delivery threshold on how many messages you manually delete from GMail, not how many spams you receive or how many automatically expire from your spambox. Now that I've thought about it, it does make a kind of sense from a certain point of view, but it's not how I assumed things would work.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Spam is spam, deleted or not.
PPS - And I like to have a rough idea how much I'm receiving.

Is it the future yet?

• Many of us carry tiny, powerful, touch-screen computers in our pockets (or purses) BUT Steve Jobs gets to say what you're allowed to do with them.
• We have tablet computers just like Star Trek, except Steve Jobs has veto over those too.
• Our books now come in electronic form, as long as you're happy for Amazon to be able to revoke them after sale.
• We can communicate with just about anyone, just about anywhere, just about any time, BUT you still need multiple user accounts to keep up with everyone, because IM and social networking are walled gardens.
• We have video phones, as long as the network stays up.
• TV is available online, quickly and cheaply ... as long as you live in the USA. You can record, pause, rewind and fast-forward live broadcasts, with the right equipment.
• In-car computing is finally starting to take off, thanks to the mobile web and GPS navigation.
• 3D printing is readily available as a service, but not generally in everyone's home yet.
• We are legally forbidden to rip our DVDs for personal viewing.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - So plenty of room yet to grow.
PPS - And probably a lot of things I haven't thought of yet.

New Year's Traditions

For a while my New Year's Eve traditions have been modest, but satisfying. I like to meet the new year on my feet, to symbolise something-or-other about not taking life lying down. This one is pretty easy. The next one is much more difficult after a long party when everyone else goes home at 1am: I stay up to watch the sunrise, because that's when we feel like days really begin in our Western culture. Admittedly, I haven't done this for a couple of years, and I don't know if I'll make it this year, but I think it's important to keep it as an ideal.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The 1am-to-6am stretch is a pretty hard slog.
PPS - Because there's little to do and, as I said, everyone's gone home.

Paper prototype your software ideas

If you have a brilliant idea for a new program or website that "just needs some programming" to get it off the ground, then you should definitely do what we call "paper prototyping". You sketch out your concept on paper - rough and ready, not neatly ruled or coloured-in - and you take it around to potential customers and users. With you playing the part of the computer, and them being the user, you simulate what happens when they click, flick and interact with your program. From this, you should gain several things: an insight into how difficult software design really is; a more solid idea of how your program or website will actually work; an impression of whether your concept is exciting to other people.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is how you start from a raw idea and move it to a design.
PPS - Trust me: any programmer will be impressed with a tested paper prototype.

Hiding things in Windows

Probably part of the security problems of Windows is that there are many different ways to hide things from the standard tools that manage the computer. There are hidden services, hidden programs, hidden files, hidden flags and attributes and any number of stealthy paths open to be exploited by malware. Microsoft set them up with the best of intentions, I'm sure, but in the end, they are far more useful to viruses than to the owner of the machine.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In fact, I'm pretty sure they were set up to hide things from you.
PPS - Well, maybe not you, specifically.

Self-personalised letters

It would be possible, via a simple database, document template and mail merge to create personalised celebrity Christmas cards to the general public. The idea would be to submit your name (or a friend's) and maybe a personalised message to a website, then after a certain cut-off time or number of entries, the celebrity has cards printed with those messages, signs them and mails them. Perfect for living in a delusional world where you have personal contact with celebrities!

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or for passing veiled personal threats to your enemies.
PPS - It would definitely be a problem keeping that database free from spam.

Facebook address book

The oldest entry in my blog drafts file is titled "No More Address Book". I wrote it in 2006, and it describes doing away with the need for address books and synchronisation by keeping one central service where we keep references to people. They change their addresses on their own, and we just use that central reference to find out how to contact our friends. I did note, however, that such a system would be ripe for the plucking by spambots and other advertisers. Fast forward 4 years and we all do this through Facebook, including the advertisers. Facebook is much more than that, of course, but it does exactly this too. Funny, isn't it?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not sure why I never posted that.
PPS - I might have wanted to write more about it, or polish it some more.

Tripod - Fabian

This Christmas Eve, remember the least-famous reindeer, as brought to you by Tripod:



Mokalus of Borg

PS - They have a few other Christmas songs.
PPS - This is one of my favourites.

The wrong kind of chess computer

Somewhere along the line we missed the point of building chess computers. We were meant to use the game's structure as a way to investigate human pattern recognition, reasoning and decision making. Instead, we powered ahead with brute force algorithms, beating human players and learning almost nothing in the process.

A real, intuitive chess program needs to group pieces together into conceptual formations, evaluate the board considering only about seven possible moves, and think a few moves ahead. Perhaps just placing those limits on chess programs - seven potential moves, maybe seven moves ahead - will start leading us in the right direction.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Applied to current methods, those limits just make bad chess programs.
PPS - But maybe someday we'll start figuring it out.

LEGO and 3D printers

I wonder if the LEGO company will collapse or adapt when we all have cheap, reliable 3D printers on our desks. After all, at that point it will become trivial to print new LEGO-compatible blocks from freely-downloadable templates. Charging lots for models and pieces will be much less sustainable as a business model in that world, and lots of people are willing to create their own designs and distribute them for free, too. The advantages I can see genuine LEGO retaining in that world are:

• Durability. Home-printed blocks are likely to be a little rougher and a little weaker than the moulded ones from LEGO.
• Colour. The home-printed blocks will probably be all the same shade of milky-white.
• Creativity. As long as LEGO has designers working on interesting new models, they'll probably still be able to sell sets.
• Electronics. 3D printers will only be producing plastic, which means electronic sets like Mindstorms will still have the vital electronic controller pieces and wired bits that crafty bricksters need for their more advanced projects.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - They've already lost a court case about producing LEGO-compatible bricks.
PPS - I think the only illegal thing would be distributing trademarked designs.

Media synchronisation via Libox

For a little while now I've been using a program of my own design to keep my pictures, music and videos synchronised across all my machines, because I couldn't find a sync program that worked exactly how I wanted. As it turns out, I was looking for something like Libox, a private, serverless media synchronisation program that's completely free. Here I want to examine why it's (almost) perfect for my needs:

- Arbitrary profiles, so I can tell it what to sync and where.

- Works between home and the office, so I can have an off-site backup in case one of my computers catches fire.

- Set and forget. Once it's up and running, it will keep going and I don't need to think about it again.

And now for why it's not so perfect:

- No bandwidth limiting. If I add a lot of new media, everything will upload as fast as it can, without disrupting my service. I can't tell it to only upload or download at a certain limited speed, and I can't tell it to only work during off-peak times, so it will chew up my peak quota as well, when it wants to.

- Does not propagate moves, renames and deletes. I have a fair amount of duplicated media, and I want to clean it up to save space. Libox focuses more on streaming media from synchronised libraries, and they're quite adamant that their application does not make changes to media on the hard drive. That's good if it's mostly for sharing, but keeps the "sync" side a bit limited.

And some things I'm uncertain about:

- Does it sync over LAN, so that machines in the same room don't send data over the web and chew up more bandwidth? Don't know, and the website is a bit light on technical details. It seems they're so excited about media sharing, or so eager to appeal to non-techies, that they avoid all tech-speak entirely.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My search goes on.
PPS - But for some of you, Libox may be what you need.

Secret passages

It seems to me it would be pretty easy, especially in some buildings, to hide secret passages and even whole rooms, behind walls that nobody questions. If you work in an office, think about the parts of your floor where you don't go, and the passages and turns that make it difficult to be sure whether your lift shafts are actually flush against this or that wall. How much of the total floor area is accessible to you, and how much of it could easily house another whole room like a board meeting room?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It would be an ideal place for the Shadow Board of Directors to meet.
PPS - Though what could they really do from such a secret location?

The Mysterious Disappearance of Thirteen

There's an episode of House M.D. where Dr Remy "Thirteen" Hadley just up and disappears, much to everyone's confusion. Obviously now we know what happened. She got stuck in TRON.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I bet that happens a lot.
PPS - Or if not, it should be a standard way to write characters out of shows.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Nothing at all

For now, I think I'm done with Friday Zombie Blogging, so this is just a farewell to this feature of the blog. I've posted about upcoming zombie movies, lots of games, zombie walks, a few pieces of art and one or two observations and thoughts. There's not that much any more that's new, innovative or interesting (to me) in the zombie sphere any more, so I'm calling it quits, or at least a hiatus. I'm prepared to reverse my decision at a later date, but until further notice, there won't be any new zombie news here.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I considered posting a montage of zombie deaths from The Walking Dead TV show.
PPS - But at the moment, the gore is not sitting well with me.

Programming puzzles

These are some of the programming puzzles that have occupied my mind this year, outside work:

• Distributed file systems with unreliable networks or no network at all.
• Multi-master file synchronisation
• Windows Presentation Foundation
• Pentominoes and exact coverage puzzles
• YAML and other human-friendly, machine-processable file formats

I have wide-ranging interests, but they tend to cluster around algorithmic investigation (WPF being the exception here). I guess I've always been an algorithmist at heart. I love to figure out how to get a computer to solve a problem, though I don't do as well as some professors do.

This also explains why I write my own software to exactly match my needs and why I get so discouraged when I need to find workarounds for bugs or limitations in the frameworks or hardware I use. It's not interesting or fun to try and trick the computer into doing what you want. Only occasionally are the limitations part of the puzzle.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The tough days are when my work is much less interesting than these puzzles.
PPS - The only classical "puzzle" here is pentominoes.

Dream therapy through programmable dreams

Given a hypothetical programmable dream machine, it could be used for therapy. Say you were afraid of heights. You (or your therapist) programs a series of dreams in which you overcome your fears through increasingly high-up experiences like stilts, springboard diving, a flying fox and hang gliding. Or say you never got over the loss of your childhood pet, and it's causing you stress now. Program a dream or two that unite you with your pet, but you say goodbye. The possibilities are endless, though some of them are undoubtedly disturbing, too.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd much rather some people express their urges in dreams than in reality.
PPS - As long as that's where it stays.

Legitimate American TV downloads in Australia

What are the legitimate ways to view American television digitally in Australia? I'm not talking about any form of broadcast or DVDs here, just pure, on-demand TV show downloads. There's iTunes, if you're lucky enough to have your show provided here. For instance, Bones is available, but Dexter is not. There's ... um ... no, actually, that's it. iTunes if you're lucky. But since each episode on iTunes costs 2.99AUD, you're better off subscribing to Foxtel and just learning to like what they show, since you'll pay far more per show on iTunes than on cable.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've written about download costs vs Foxtel before.
PPS - At least the iTunes cost seems to have dropped by $1 since then.

MP3 vs AVI

Long ago we settled on a standard format for music files. It's not the only one, and it has many options and variants, but it is universally supported. When are we going to settle on such a format for video? AVI is the most popular and many major devices refuse to support it. Furthermore, if you want to buy music in MP3 format, (almost) everything is available and it hardly matters where in the world you are. If you want to buy movies and TV digitally, you pretty much have to live inside the United States.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I realis AVI still comprises a variety of codecs.
PPS - Still, can't we settle on one?

Racial mute

When reading about "racial" problems, events, prejudices and whatever else, I like to mentally snip out the race words to see what has really happened. For example:

"Many white business owners chose to close their businesses and move away rather than hire black employees"

Becomes:

"Many business owners chose to close their businesses and move away rather than hire employees"

Which is just weird.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I mean, imagine presenting it as part of a business plan sometime.
PPS - Similarly odd effects can be had by reversing the roles.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Zombie Accountant

This week in zombie news I present Zombie Accountant, a fairly simple side-scrolling platformer, has you collecting tax returns and avoiding eating your co-workers. It actually looks like good, mindless fun.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I gather it's on XBox and Windows Phone 7.
PPS - And the full version only costs $1.

Standard meals to measure food

Like the "standard drinks" model for alcohol where we know how much our liver can metabolise in an hour, we should adopt a "standard meals" system to tackle obesity. Everyone's metabolism is different, yadda yadda, so is everyone's liver, but we still have that model, don't we? It should be easier than calorie-counting for fast food, and if we define 3 standard meals as how much one person should eat in one day, then printing "6.2 standard meals" beside some menu item would really make you stop to think. Based on a sub-standard Google Search, one standard meal should probably equal 500-600 calories.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It may need a more complex definition than a calorie count.
PPS - But it's a place to start.

Doubling the price of houses

Thirty years ago the price of a house was about three years wages. Now it's six. It seems more likely to be exponential than linear growth which means it will be twelve years wages by 2040 and twenty-four years' wages by 2070. By 2100, you'd need most of your income for most of your working life to afford a house, and that's if you don't eat, clothe yourself or have a family. If you expect a working spouse to help, you should also expect that advantage to disappear by 2130, when most of their wage will be required too. In 2160, your children will inherit your house debt. In 2190, their children will inherit yours and their parents' too. Long before then, something will change.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It has to, because it's unsustainable that way.
PPS - One change might be a property price crash.

Drive-through convenience store

How many times have you been driving home and realised you needed a loaf of bread, some milk or whatever other staples you frequently run out of? Wouldn't it be great to have a drive-through convenience store where you could get those things without having to get out of your car? I would definitely have used such a store at least once, if it existed.

Now the down sides. The selection would be a little limited by necessity. The prices would likely be higher even than ordinary convenience stores. And if you're ordering a lot, you might need to stop to arrange it properly in your car before heading back on the road anyway. Still, it would be interesting to see someone give it a go.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - A quick Google search confirms I'm not the first one with this idea.
PPS - Still, it's not so common that I'd call it "convenient".

An alternative to holding on the phone

Instead of putting people on hold in this technological age, can't we put them in a call-back queue? Then they can hang up and go about their business until someone is ready to assist them. This would be particularly helpful when congestion at the call centre is very high, but would actually be bad when it's very low, since it would be more trouble in that situation. I also imagine people would be very distrusting of such a call-back system, and would rather wait than risk never hearing back again. Still, if you trusted it, all you'd have to do is call the queue line, state your name and reason for calling, then hang up. Caller ID can handle the number, or you can specify another by using your keypad. If you're on a mobile, you could even text in a call-back request.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This doesn't even seem like it would have to be very high-tech.
PPS - Would you trust a high-tech version more than a low-tech one?

Excel vs Access

Is Excel the reason Access is so bad? For most people, Excel is their "database" tool of choice, and for good reason. It has flexible tabular data CRUD operations, search, sort, group and pivot query functions, plus it makes charts. It can load data from external sources, calculate results, colour-code them and export them in other useful formats. It can even be programmed in VBA or, with the most recent versions, CLR managed code. Given all these features, what advantages does Access confer? It doesn't even add multi-user capabilities cleanly, and getting up and running with an Access database is much harder than opening Excel. Given such a consumer focus on Excel, is it any wonder Microsoft would spend a lot more time and effort on it than on Access?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I can imagine more Access features being added to Excel over time.
PPS - But my imagination doesn't drive Microsoft.

Friday Zombie Blogging - No more P&P&Z movie

Rumour has it that the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies movie adaptation might be dead. The director bailed out, then Natalie Portman, producer and star, ditched in favour of playing Lois Lane in a new Superman movie. Looks like we might not get zombie action plus Jane Austen on our screens for a while.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then again, you can't keep a good zombie down.
PPS - Which part of the cast or crew would count as the head?

High standards vs growth

Debbie and I recently started karate together (well, I started again) and I wondered about maintaining standards versus growth. On the one hand, you want to maintain high standards that encourage people to join and build up the club's reputation. On the other hand, you need instructors if you want to grow, and not all of them are likely to meet the standards, so eventually you need to start being more lenient and allowing average instructors through, rather than just the outstanding ones. Past a certain size, you'll either lose your standards or stop growing. Probably both at once. High standards are (usually) incompatible with fast growth.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I can't think of any general high-quality growth examples off the top of my head.
PPS - I'm sure there are a few exceptions that prove the rule.

GMail and conversation view

My boss and co-workers were complaining that GMail does not allow you to turn off "conversation view", where items with the same subject are grouped together. I found it within a few minutes, and a quick test confirmed that it works just as described. It's a pretty recent addition, though, so it's no wonder they didn't know it existed. What I don't understand is why you wouldn't want it. Personally, I would hate to be searching through my email looking for the different connected pieces of one conversation. I suppose if you get tons of unrelated mail all with the same subject heading it might get annoying, but apart from that, I'd rather have it on than off.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't get a lot of same-subject email.
PPS - And GMail doesn't seem to group it together anyway if there's a long gap.

The world of tomorrow

My friends recently made a whole new person called Georgia. Thinking this morning of the world she will grow up in, I noted the following things:

1. There have always been iPhones and iPads.
2. There has never been an unbroken male line of Australian Prime Ministers.
3. Michael Jackson has always been dead. Same with Heath Ledger.
4. WiFi has always been available on planes, and the TSA has always tried to stop you getting on board.
5. There has never been a building called the World Trade Centre.
6. George W Bush has always been a former President of the United States.

There's obviously a lot more that will be true about the world by the time she grows up, and it's possible items 4 and 5 won't stay on the list, but it's interesting to think about.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't think I'd recognise this world through those eyes.
PPS - At least not yet. They can't quite focus.

Standard photo naming and organisation

What standard naming convention would you want for your photos? There are any number of metadata bits that might be relevant for photos, and some of them I would like to store in the file name. There's the date it was taken, where, why (as in, what event, if any), who took it and who is pictured. The "who" questions can probably be answered in a secondary database like Picasa, but the rest should provide some means of automatic organisation. I think I'd want them in monthly folders, but I'd want to vary the actual file names for landscapes (location), portraits (subject) and happy snaps (event).

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Group shots might give me trouble.
PPS - Does anyone have a standard photo naming and organisation scheme?

Reasons Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is two movies

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I can't see how there could be other reasons.
PPS - Well, probably not.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Anne Hathaway

In a promo video for Saturday Night Live this week, Anne Hathaway has a zombie moment. It being Thanksgiving, she says she is thankful for brains. Aren't we all?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And for Anne Hathaway.
PPS - Not sure if there's more about brains in the actual show.

Automatic doors at home

I saw an ad the other day for a product so simple yet so ingenious that it had already been invented: automatic sliding doors. The unique thing in this case was the fact that it was packaged as an add-on motor and sensor for existing domestic doors. Genius! Makes me wonder why nobody else ever thought of doing that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Perhaps they did, but never had the cash to get it off the ground.
PPS - Or the determination, or the right connections...

The tiny little cute store

Every time I am shopping with girls and we see some version of a common item that's smaller than usual, there's a definite excited reaction. Tiny saucepans, little boxes, micro-sized cake tins, it's all the same. This gives me an idea: the Tiny Little Cute Things Store, full of really little things for girls to love and men to loathe. It would sell basically everything you'd need in a house if you happened to be child-sized. No female would leave empty handed, and I'll make a killing!

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It would be a great place to shop for cubby houses.
PPS - Or play kitchens.

Alternative dishwasher designs

Our dishwasher never seems to clean properly the items that sit in the corners of the racks. This looks like an obvious design consequence of using one circular spinning spray arm to clean a square rack. So how would you solve that problem? I can think of three things off the top of my head that might work better: circular racks, four smaller spinning arms and a fixed square array of spray nozzles. They all have their problems, I'm sure, and since I'm not a white goods engineer, I doubt I've even thought through all the consequences. I just wonder whether it's pure economics that means the single spinning arm design is the only one we see.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've always been a fan of the industrial dishwasher with free-moving trays.
PPS - But that's a bit impractical for home use.

Airline ticket scam

I've just heard about a complicated website scam that basically launders stolen credit cards through airlines. The scam goes as follows: criminals use stolen credit cards to purchase airline tickets, which they sell at discounted prices for cash through a website (using "mule" bank accounts to transfer the money). Victims who purchase the tickets can even call and confirm their flights, but once the credit card is reported as stolen and the charge reversed, the ticket is canceled, the money is gone via its intermediate route and they have no real recourse. It's fairly clever in that the victims get real products, the criminals get cash and the money trail (thanks to the mules) is hard for victims to follow up.

Now, how would you investigate this? First I'd want to get as many of the mule account details as possible, and track any common transfers they've made to third parties. Chances are, however, that the end points are dead ends, another mule (who withdraws cash to transfer in person) or far outside local police jurisdiction.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not sure what they'll end up doing.
PPS - I hope it catches these guys, though.

Friday Zombie Blogging - PvNvZvP

Coming soon to iPhone and its cousins, Pirates vs Ninjas vs Zombies vs Pandas, in case your iPhone doesn't have enough zombie-themed games yet. This one seems to be about hurling its namesakes at other players' defenses as living projectiles, presumably in an attempt to knock down walls and take over territory.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's not entirely clear from the screenshots.
PPS - And the trailer is still "coming soon".

William, Kate and Diana

For the past day or two, all the news has been about Prince William getting engaged to Kate Middleton, only somehow it hasn't. What I've heard about so far is Diana's ring, Diana's dress from Diana's dressmaker, how sad it is that Diana is not here to see Diana's boy get married to a girl everyone wishes was Diana II. Some parts of the world, and especially the royal family, have got to start being about people that are not Diana. Let these two be themselves, and let them make their own way.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not saying forget about her.
PPS - Just don't make her overshadow people a full 13 years after her death.

Mobile broadband and phone tethering

I predict that dedicated mobile broadband plans with their own USB modems will disappear in favour of ordinary mobile phone plans and occasional tethering, at least for domestic applications. There are only a couple of situations in which dedicated mobile data at 3G speeds comes in handy, and they overlap completely with mobile phone usefulness. It's going to become an increasingly hard sell, which is why most providers are attempting to prevent you from tethering your phone unless you pay extra. With today's phone plans and included data, they suddenly have a stockpile of absurd, outdated wireless modems they either need to sell or write off. And since they have near-total control of their wireless networks, they're choosing to impose restrictions to upsell you on the tethering option, or get you to buy dedicated mobile "broadband" while that still sounds halfway sane.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In my first month of an internet-enabled phone plan, I've used less than 100MB.
PPS - That might be just me.

Super speed for the win

My standard answer to the question of what super-power I would take is super speed. I guess it says a lot about my outlook on life - there's never enough time in the day to get everything done. If I had super-speed, I could read entire books in a flash, travel anywhere without wasting a lot of time in between and generally do more instead of feeling like time is rushing by. There's also the really cool effect of being able to get in and out of anywhere before people notice ... except for the sonic boom and other chaos.

I guess the down side would be that I'd find it hard to do my ordinary desk job because I'd be cramming six months of work into an hour before anyone could tell me what to do next. I suppose, however, that I could earn my day-to-day living in emergency response and pizza delivery while writing novels in the blink of an eye.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I could also do stocktake for retail stores so quickly they wouldn't need to close down.
PPS - Though they'd need to double-check the results.

TransLink

I've been a long-time critic of the TransLink website for its limited, stylised maps, poor descriptions of bus stop locations and generally confusing trip planner results. They've just launched a new website that is much prettier ... and exactly as useful as the old one, which is not enough. I'm not saying they haven't put some effort in here, because it's clearly been someone's year-long project to attach bells and whistles and generally polish things up. What I'm saying is that if you're going to redesign your website, take the time to run a usability study and find out where the problems are.

For most of your users, the problems will not be "the menus aren't animated enough" nor "I need the individual parts of my journey planner results to light up when I mouse over them". For me, the first thing I would say in that focus group would be: "when I get my journey planner results, I need to go elsewhere to load a map to figure out where my bus stop is, and even then I'm not sure I've got it right".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've heard they plan to make their data available to Google Maps before the end of the year.
PPS - If they can do that, surely they can integrate real maps in their own website.

Miles Dyson's lack of curiosity

If you were Miles Dyson working at Cyberdyne Systems in the universe of Terminator 2, what would you think about the chip you were studying? Personally, I believe I would assume it came from a millitary operation that went wrong - something advanced and secret from the US armed forces blew up in some Afghanistan desert somewhere and someone managed to find the chip to copy.

The robot arm, however, would be much harder to explain, which is a little unexpected given how much less advanced it is. However, it's far more specialised. A chip could be used for anything from missile guidance to robot vision or radio signal encryption. A robot limb in the exact shape of a human arm doesn't involve so much imagination. Either it came from a whole human-shaped robot or it was a prosthetic for an amputee. If it belongs with the highly-advanced chip, however, you have to be talking humanoid robot.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That "don't ask where it came from" policy just wouldn't work.
PPS - Not with a bunch of engineers.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Christmas Carols

"It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Zombies! A Book of Zombie Christmas Carols" features zombified versions of Christmas carols. I'm hoping it's not just a case of all the lyrics being turned to "brains".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Although a group of zombie carolers singing about brains would be a sight to see.
PPS - Right before they eat you, of course.

The natural state of a TODO list

What is the natural state of a TODO list? Is it naturally empty, always growing or always in motion? Your one true TODO list will never be really empty, and it shouldn't just sit stagnant, ever-growing and eventually ignored. It needs to be in constant flow, like a stream of water, with new items coming in and done items going out. Your list will shrink and grow sometimes, but on the whole it will probably remain about the same size. The particular items on the list, however, should definitely change, and technically (according to the Getting Things Done method) nothing should stay there longer than two weeks. That's a real trick, and I certainly don't have it down.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That's what weekly reviews are for.
PPS - I haven't made time to do them lately.

Proposing a heckler's license

Deb and I went to see Tripod the other night, and it was pretty good. Now, of course, most live comedy events will have a heckler or two, and this was no exception. The band was pretty good about it, and even encouraged it by interacting with the guy, because, well, that's part of the spontenaity of a live event. The trouble was, for the most part, this particular heckler was just bad at it.

So I think it's time there was a license involved. You take your six months at Heckling School and get your official Heckler's License for this state, and then you're free to heckle at any live comedy gig. It might be a bit more disruptive during the show to have ushers going around checking licenses, and the performers want to know they're being heckled by a worthy opponent, so they may need to be given special hats or something to identify them quickly. I'm sure we can work out the kinks later.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or we could just put in a heckler's pit at the front of the stage.
PPS - Then open a big trap door just as the performers come out.

Where memes go to die

There are certain ideas that are really mean or unpleasant to pass on. I know several of them, because I am on the internet a lot, but I'm not even going to mention any of them by name or implication, because that's the point of this post. The only reason to tell other people about these things is to share your pain, but these are not the kinds of situations where pain shared is halved. If anything, it multiplies. For myself, I prefer to be a place where such evil memes go to die. I won't pass them on, and I won't talk about them. Those times where I find myself in power to do so, I will prevent others from passing them on, too. They will never truly die, I suppose, but by being voluntary meme quarantine zones, we can help slow their spread.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Now if only I could reverse the spread and actually destroy one.
PPS - Or stop new ones being created.

GMail priority inbox continuum

Email has gotten to such ridiculous levels for some people that plain old spam filtering isn't enough. I like Google's idea of Priority Inbox, where it helps you decide what is important and what's not, but I'm not so sure about the way it divides the inbox into tiers. I'm sure they tried it, but I wonder how it would look if they just sorted the inbox by perceived importance, highest at the top, lowest at the bottom. There's not always a clear distinction between Important and Unimportant, but some things are more important than others. With just a continual gradation from Most Important to Least Important, no matter how much Important email you get, the most important stuff is always at or near the top.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't get nearly enough email to test this.
PPS - And I'm not going to try getting enough.

One-way trips to Mars

So NASA is talking about one-way trips to Mars, because the difficulty with getting to Mars is getting back. But who do we send? Then consider the jail debate: we have some prisoners on death row that we're just going to execute. It seems like two problems with one solution, where we turn Mars into a prison planet. The bonus is a new reality TV show, too. The unintended side-effect? Only one guy arrives alive at Mars, wearing a necklace made of ears.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In reality, a one-way trip to Mars will probably be even more expensive.
PPS - Because after a few years, you have to send a rescue mission.

Desktop environment missing features

Things that are missing from today's computer desktops:

1. Multi-touch monitors. Not that you would use them all the time, but why the hell do we only put touch screens on mobiles?

2. Tabbed desktops. Just about every program has tabs for different contexts or documents these days. It's time the desktop environment caught up.

3. Zoomable desktops. MS Office has started to go the right way with a zoom slider in the bottom right corner. Desktop environments need to play catch-up again.

4. Universal file tagging, with accompanying search and browse functions. My files don't fit in single folders and if they did, I'd forget where I put them. I should be able to use ad-hoc tags to identify my files, and don't forget the ability to list all untagged files either.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We seem to have had basically the same visual environment since the original Macintosh.
PPS - Or only slight improvements.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Hand-painted shoes

Some enterprising artisan has created some hand-painted zombie-foot shoes. Well done.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Oh, and the post-walk announcement for the 2010 Brisbane Zombie Walk is up.
PPS - In short, 10000 participants, $13000 for the Brain Foundation, and behave yourself next year.

Job satisfaction

I read recently that the myth of the "dream job" tends to make you put less emphasis on your current job and forget the hard work necessary to start your own business. Once you look past the fluff like "have the courage to follow your dreams", you find that most people who did so were already skilled in a valuable and rare field, which is what they went and used to start their dream job business. The other half of the argument said that people who perceive their own jobs as a career or even a calling are more likely to be satisfied where they are, and they found some very ordinary jobs with very satisfied people to back it up.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - So the moral is that job satisfaction has a lot more to do with you than your job.
PPS - Unless your job involves regular abuse or questions about fries.

For the price of a cup of coffee

I jokingly posted to Facebook the other day that charities who sell useless pins and pens "for the price of a cup of coffee" should just raise funds by selling coffee. Coffee is pretty cheap to make, and now rather than asking people to give up their coffee to help a charity, you're giving them coffee and the opportunity to help a charity. It seems like a slightly better way of doing things, mostly because what you're selling is now consumable instead of destined for landfill, nobody has to change their behaviour much (just buy your coffee from here instead of there) and you might get noticed as the charity that actually thinks about fundraising a bit differently.

The one disadvantage is the loss of free advertising. When you sell someone a pin, if they wear it, you advertise your charity to other people and your donors get to display their support publicly. The Facebook comments sorted that out quickly enough: just get the cardboard cups printed up with the name and logo of your charity. If enough charities buy into the idea, you might even be able to offer this as a regular service at a permanent location, though that might drive the overheads up a bit.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I would buy a coffee from a place like that.
PPS - Then there are others who prefer the pens and pins. To each their own.

Electronics convergence

All portable electronics are destined to be converged into the mobile phone. That is not to say that there won't still be iPods, GPS navigators, cameras, ebook readers and so on, but our phones will be able to do the same thing well enough that they will swallow up the low end of the market almost automatically. Only if you want really high quality or fine-grained control will you need to buy a dedicated device. For everything else, there's an app for that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And for some things, an app is the only time such functions have been feasible.
PPS - That's the extreme low end of the market where it's not worth making dedicated hardware.

Australian public holiday oddities

There are a few oddities in the Christmas 2010 and Easter 2011 public holidays in Australia coming up. First, since both Christmas and Boxing day are on a weekend, their public holidays have been moved to the Monday and Tuesday BUT the Monday one is officially for Boxing day, which means we get our public holiday for Boxing Day before Christmas Day. As for Easter, it turns out ANZAC Day is on Easter Monday, so an extra public holiday has been scheduled for Tuesday, making the Easter long weekend in 2011 a whopping 5 days long. As if that weren't enough, the real Christmas and New Years' Days are also public holidays, though they fall on weekends, which bumps up the official count of public holidays for the year, but doesn't really provide any benefit.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I almost forgot to post today.
PPS - But by my clock, I still have about 83 minutes left of today.

NaNoWriMo and motivation

Only about 20% of people who sign up for NaNoWriMo actually complete their 50 000 words. What does that tell you about writing and people? To me, it says that a publicly-declared intention does not ensure follow-through on a goal, and that setting the goal is not the problem. It takes more than "just get started, then keep going" to write a novel, and those 80% of people who fail will attest to that. I think NaNoWriMo needs to look to those 80% of failed participants and ask them what went wrong. Did they run out of steam? Was their idea not sustainable for the length of a novel? Were they derailed by some personal disaster, or could they just not commit to the time it took every day?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Not enough attention is paid to failure stories these days.
PPS - Which is a pity. We could learn so much.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Left 4 Dead mods

This week, two mods for Left 4 Dead:
One which mimics Super Mario 64 settings, in case you felt Mario didn't have enough zombies to fight.
The other replaces zombies with Teletubbies, in case you want to do violence to children's TV.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I haven't actually played Left 4 Dead, modded or not.
PPS - I don't know whether I would enjoy it.

Supervillains and unusual weapons

Why do supervillains spend so much time and effort developing hand-held freeze rays, death rays and other weapons when we already have ordinary guns? Either they have some kind of fixation with non-lethal weapons or they want to prove their intelligence by going out of their way to create unusual ways of doing harm and incapacitating people.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Personally, I'd probably go with a freeze ray.
PPS - Not an ice ray, but more of a time-stopping gun.

Bees 1, Humans 0

I've just read that bees out-perform our best traveling salesman algorithms, and it's not entirely clear why. I think the abstraction of the problem doesn't directly translate into physical space all the time, and that could skew the results. A computer needs to travel the graph in a specified manner, only following connections that are given between nodes. How do you model, for a bee, that flower A can be reached from flower B, but never directly from flower C? No matter how you lay them out, you can never exclude a particular route between two points without completely constraining the results.

As observed, however, this indicates one of two things: tiny clusters of neurons are more powerful computers than anything we have ever built, or we have drastically misunderstood this problem. Given how often nature outsmarts us, I'm going with option 2, but either way is a pretty big failure on the part of us humans. Either we can't build a computer as powerful as a few bee neurons or decades of programming has never yielded the shortcut.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Apparently I have trouble explaining why this is a difficult problem.
PPS - If it wasn't difficult, quite frankly, it wouldn't be a problem at all.

What IKEA needs

Outside IKEA, there needs to be an area designated for family members to camp for the night with purchases that didn't fit in the car this time around. Now the question is: who do you leave behind to guard your stuff?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It would depend on who you have with you and what they're guarding.
PPS - You might find they've banded together and built a fort with other stranded people when you return.

Phone obsolescence

It's scary how quickly mobile phones become outdated and obsolete. Our phone companies make us sign on for two years to get a handset, the warranty is typically 12 months and the phone is woefully out of date after 6 months. Are we going to reach a point where things level out? Mobiles will always lag behind desktop computers in all attributes so there will probably always be advancements to be made, especially if we keep on changing wireless technology.

The thing is, at some point there's not much difference between dirt cheap speed and memory amounts. When there's not much practical difference between processor speed, memory and storage, we've reached the point of "good enough", where basic hardware meets everyone's needs adequately, and no one handset has much of an advantage beyond any other. Then there is no obsolete, only worn out.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I would like to live in those days.
PPS - But then there would be something else to complain about.

Fighting tsunami with tsunami

Can a tsunami be stopped by a head-on collision with another tsunami? With ordinary waves, the answer is "no", because a wave is not moving water, but moving energy, and two ordinary waves will not collide but briefly mix, then proceed on their way, much unchanged. To stop a wave, you need to absorb, divert or nullify the energy, which pretty much means walls, not waves. But if a tsunami is actually moving water, then perhaps a lot of the energy can be absorbed by a counter-tsunami, assuming you can create such a thing.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - From Wikipedia, it looks like a counter-tsunami would only be useful on land.
PPS - And that makes no sense.

Friday Zombie Blogging - BZW2010

I know I mentioned it before, but now all the details of Brisbane Zombie Walk 2010 are worked out. From noon on the 24th - this Sunday! - from Wickham Park to Centenary Park, I and a lot of other zombie-attired people will be shuffling and moaning to raise money for the Brain Foundation. Apparently there will be food and entertainment beforehand, as well as an after-party. Should be pretty cool!

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If I'd been more organised, I might have gone with a Plants vs Zombies costume.
PPS - As it is, I'll pretty much be "cubicle zombie", with a name tag and old computer mouse.

Respect for astronauts

Just as I was going to sleep the other day, I got a weird kind of sympathetic claustrophobia on behalf of astronauts. For that moment, I could almost imagine being sealed inside a tin can millions of kilometres from the nearest atmosphere, and it freaked me out. From that point of view, it's like having to be buried alive to see the stars.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That might be why they look forward to spacewalks so much.
PPS - It would be like getting out for some fresh air, in a weird way.

Sharing Skype

It seems awkward sometimes that Skype can't have two accounts signed in on the one machine simultaneously. If I have a separate account to Deb, but we share one computer most of the time, then we need to choose which one of those two accounts will be signed in, but we might not have matching contact lists, so, for instance, Deb might miss a chance to talk to an old college friend because they think she is not online. It's a pain to switch accounts, and it's not always possible either.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The only answer I've seen is to use two Windows accounts and external handsets.
PPS - Or not share a computer.