Every surface as a touch screen

I've read some science fiction stories and some technology speculation where people predict that our future homes, offices and everything is a computer touch screen. Our desks, our walls, our ceilings and floors, public spaces and private ones too. It seems to me that they usually assume this will be done by making touch screen computers thinner, cheaper and as easy to apply as paint.

I wonder, though, whether you could do it today with projectors and gesture recognition. To turn every surface in a home into a touch screen, you'd just mount projectors to the ceiling. Point them everywhere, and use a system like the Kinect to track people and gestures. They'd be like light fittings. This strikes me as a better idea than trying to build in or attach a touch screen monitor to every surface.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Though still very expensive with today's technology.
PPS - And not especially private.

Online vs offline

There are two ways the future of computing can go, in my opinion, and we'll probably get both of them. First, the network starts blurring the lines between what is local and what is remote, to the point where you'd talk more about your services and data than your computer. Wherever you go, as long as there is a network connection, you can get to your own files, contacts and services, because computing is such a part of our lives that it's woven into the very walls of our existence. Every surface is a computer.

The other direction is to gain more power in our phones, up to the point where they are our primary computing devices, capable of all our everyday actions like playing, reading, creating, communicating and working. Meshed with local services like big touch screens and cameras, they provide everything we ever need, right in our pockets. Everywhere I go, I have a computer with me.

It's a subtle difference, but quite important when the network goes down. If you have a local copy of your files in your pocket, plus the apps to use them, you can still work, to an extent. If everything you have is online, including your files, then you have nothing until you can get a connection. In big modern cities, that might not be a big deal, but travelling between them, or to an area dominated by a rival network provider, you'll be out of luck. In that way, offline storage and power is more important than online, because you just can't beat the availability.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The network is a lot less available than you think.
PPS - This is why it worries me when everything is online.

Steam and geographic restrictions

What is the business case for Steam geo-locking games that are only ever sold via download? I really want to know, because it seems like nothing but a way to keep away potential customers. How much does it cost to enable those games for those regions? Zero. If nobody buys, what's the harm? Zero. And what will it get you in return? Anywhere from zero upwards. If somebody does buy, what's the gain? Pure profit. From this chain of reasoning, it's clear to see that geo-locking is an anti-profit technology.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Okay, there may be some other factors like local classification laws.
PPS - But not always.

Friday Flash Fiction - Pablo

"Doctor, I don't understand what my mind is telling me," says the patient as he sits across from me.

"How do you mean?" I prompt back.

"It's like a hazy dream, but it keeps getting clearer rather than fading away. And it's more every day."

"How about you tell me your dream?"

"I dream about being a dictator of a small Eastern-European nation. I have mercenaries at my disposal, I call myself General. My portrait is posted on every street corner and there are holidays in my honour that I have declared." He has puffed up a little, then deflates with a sheepish look. "Sometimes I remember specific things, like a plane ride or some ... execution. It's disturbing, but kind of exciting, too. It feels like a lot of power for one man."

"It sounds like a subconscious fantasy, perhaps a response to your job. How long have you been a janitor?"

"Three years now. No, four, I think. You really think it is just a dream? It feels very real."

I wave away the question and try to keep talking about his job. "And you've worked all four years at the one place?"

"Si. Yes." he says, eyeing me suspiciously for a moment.

"Maybe it's time to look for a change of scenery. How about the headaches?"

"A small one all this week. It comes and goes."

"Okay, I'm going to increase your anxiety medication a little." I fill out a new prescription. "I'll see you again next week, Pablo."

"Yes ... if I have the time."

He stands to leave and gives me one last quizzical look. After he closes the door behind him, I make some notes and pick up the phone, dialling a number from memory.

"Chief? Doctor Silvestra. It's about 'Pablo'. The memories are coming back, and I'm not sure how long the drugs can keep them suppressed, and that's if he keeps taking them. We may need to discuss other options."

"Sil, this *is* the other option. We convinced the CIA that assassination wasn't necessary and incarceration wouldn't work. This is supposed to be the new way. If we can't make it work, it's back to the bad old days. Try reprogramming him again, and find him a wife this time."

"I ... Yes, Chief."

I hang up the phone and try to remember how many times we have done this. In twenty years since deposing General Viktor Nostroyev, we have reprogrammed him, let's see, eleven times including those two weeks in Florida. It's worked for longer this time, but the unravelling has progressed further, too. Next time we might not get the same chance to move him.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This one has come together in a few stages.
PPS - Please let me know what you think.

The speed of phone technology advancement

Mobile phone technology moves a lot in two years. I have a phone that was new and exciting 24 months ago. It's running Symbian S60. Meanwhile, whole generations of iPhones have come and gone, as have several versions of Google's Android. Windows Phone 7 has been released, Nokia announced their undying love for it and canned development on not one but three of their own operating systems.

It's understandable that a 24-month warranty on mobile handsets might upset some of these telecom companies. It's just too long to keep supporting hardware and software in a fast-paced industry like that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My pone is due to be replaced now.
PPS - I'll be going with an Android model.

Saving the world

Why do you save the world? So ordinary people can live their ordinary lives. That was an argument made in Torchwood and, like all deeply true things, it is opposite to the way the world thinks. It feels like people out there saving the world are doing the big job, the important one, the only one that matters, but if you take away the ordinary people, then there's nothing to save. Of course, if you take away the world-savers too, then there'd be nobody doing the saving, so they're both necessary, but the reason you save the world is so regular people can go about their business untroubled.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It also means I'm not unimportant just because I'm not saving the world.
PPS - If you follow my multi-negative point.

Operating system contexts

Our computers are still very much focused on the OS+app model, where you have an operating system and a selection of applications open. The organisation, if it can be said to exist at all, is taken from the "big pile, you sort it out" school of thought. It's up to you to remember what each app is for and what you were doing with it.

What if, instead, the operating system allowed you to set up different operating contexts, with collections of applications in each one, each with certain files open and certain settings relevant to that context, like "Research for Project A" with web browser tabs and note-taking programs, "Socialising" with chat and Facebook open and so on. Switching contexts is different to switching applications, especially when a task or project involves more than one program.

It could also be useful for contractors who have more than one job at any given time, and need to remember which documents and programs go with which client. To me, this seems like a more user-centric way of organising our machines, rather than making our mode of operation fit the machine's way of thinking.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Sometimes I wish I had this.
PPS - I guess the OS vendors are too busy making things shiny to worry about productivity.

Hollywood vs hard drives

Anything you can download or store for yourself scares the pants off the entertainment industry. If computers (and phones and games consoles and portable media players and GPS devices and ebook readers and so on) didn't have hard drives, the MAFIAA would be a lot happier, because then everything would have to be streamed over the network every time, and piracy would be dead since there's no way to store anything. So all they need to do to retain their old business models is destroy the entire market for consumer devices with any kind of storage capacity.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Anyone else would look at that situation and say "oh, well, what else can we do?".
PPS - Apparently Hollywood says "challenge accepted!".

Being exceptional

Anyone can love the lovable. Anyone can give up what they don't want to keep. Anyone can persist when the going is easy. Loving, giving and persisting are not commendable in those cases, because that's the default position. You need to love the unlovely, give up what you want and perservere against resistence to be exceptional. Nobody gets commended or noticed for doing something really easy or common.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's hard to be exceptional.
PPS - That's pretty much what "exceptional" means.

Thin operating systems

With the move to more online services, are desktop operating systems likely to become "thinner"? That is, providing fewer services besides disk management, hardware drivers and network connections. It seems likely. Google is starting to market "Chromebooks" which are laptops running pretty much nothing but a web browser. So what about private data I don't want to store online? I have tens of gigabytes of pictures and videos that are way too big for cloud storage. What is Google's plan for them? And what about my apps that don't have web equivalents, like City of Heroes and my programming tools? Although Google's ads claim "you can do everything online", I don't think that's quite true yet.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Maybe it will be eventually.
PPS - That does seem to be the trend.

Friday Flash Fiction - Heroes Dream

We perch atop a skyscraper surveying the city. My friend's name to the world is Cruel Fate. They know me as Dread Naught, which means 'fear nothing'. We are superheroes, like half the population of the city. I ask my friend "Where do you think people go when they log out?"

CF snorts derisively. "You think too much, Dread. They don't 'go' anywhere. Nothing happens between logins."

"How do you know?"

He rolls his eyes the way he does when he thinks I'm being dense. "Because I've logged out hundreds of times and nothing has happened to me. So have you. It's like going to sleep."

"You don't dream?"

"Of course not." He is still scanning the streets below, looking for roving gangs. Then he thinks enough to ask: "Do you dream?"

"I think so, sometimes. It's like I'm a big green orc in another world, only it's not quite me, you know? It's a bit like here, but different."

He scrunches his forehead, thinking hard. "No, sorry, Dread. I don't know what you mean."

"I think there are other worlds out there, but they're not really ... connected to ours. It's like we're all different parts of someone else's dream."

"You mean, like, we're not even real?"

"Like that, yeah. We're all kind of playthings. A game played by God, or something."

Fate gets a deep, distant look as he considers this. Then he spots a mob on the street, points with a gleeful "Ha!" and drops like a stone over the edge of the building. I follow quickly, not to miss out on the action, and the wind whips our capes like flags as we plummet thirty stories to street level. He's probably right. How could this not be real?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I just wondered one day what it would look like to MMORPG characters when other characters logged out.
PPS - And how it would feel for them.

TV input renaming

Why doesn't my TV allow me to rename the inputs to be more meaningful? Once a device is plugged in, it doesn't matter to me that it's going over HDMI connection number 1. It matters that it's my XBox. Granted, it would take more effort to provide the capability, and we have enough trouble understanding our technology without added complexity, but I think once it's done it would help a lot of people. Maybe some high-end televisions allow it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - On the other hand, how many people would take the time to set it up?
PPS - I'd be one of the few who did.

Context and cross referencing

Our tools are missing context and deeper search. For instance, answer me this question about your Facebook account: which of your friends are in both of any two groups you choose? Or did any actors play in both of two given movies? That's "cross-referencing", and almost no program or website does it. Google sort of does, but only for keywords in documents, and there's a lot of data that is not kept in documents like that. It's an essential tool if you want to go beyond merely finding information and understanding it or comparing it with other information. We need our software to do this.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My own software doesn't do this either.
PPS - Except that one basic file search tool.

Expectations vs technology

For some of us, our expectations of technology are lower than average in terms of reliability, but higher in terms of potential. This tends to be the attitude among tech workers. We think bigger, but expect less day to day. For people who just need to use it day to day, the opposite seems to be true: they expect it to be very reliable, but can imagine a lot less of what technology could do for them. I guess they just wish it would work properly today, rather than thinking ahead to tomorrow.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Because if you can't rely on it today, how can you do so tomorrow?
PPS - And if it never does anything new, what's the point?

Replacement parts

As manufacturing has moved from items with many components connected together with wires to more integrated designs, the concept of "replacement parts" has drifted out of use. A TV used to be a collection of little systems working together - a cathode ray tube, an electron gun, a phosphor screen, a channel knob, an antenna - to bring a picture to you. Now we have TVs that consist entirely of one integrated component with a plastic case around it. If it breaks, the only "replacement part" you can get to fix it is an entirely new television. Ditto for phones, except for replacement screens, every kitchen appliance made in the past decade and too many mass-market computers. If it breaks, you might as well buy a new one, because repairs cost just as much. When did we get this wasteful?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Custom-made goods are even worse in this regard.
PPS - Unless they've been designed with common components.

Friday Flash Fiction - A Pinch of Time

The old man tends his garden carefully, because it is literally his life. The memory-bulbs grow under the surface in the corner by the fence, his strength tree in the middle, mood flowers over there near the gate, and close to the house he keeps the time herbs. They won't grow indefinitely. That's the nature of these mystic plants, but whenever he can get a new cutting to take root, he knows he will live longer. Today he is transplanting thorned rose bushes, grown for his teeth and eyesight, to a sunnier place, where the beans used to grow. Some days he misses those beans, and the hair on his head, but it is only cosmetic. He will survive as long as he can grow more thyme. He carefully uproots the roses and moves them to the freshly dug holes, packing rich, dark earth around their bases, not too tightly, and pruning the branches with love, but no misplaced mercy.

During the replanting, a thorn pierces his skin, and the wound seeps a little blood. The tree, too, oozes sap from a branch in sympathy, and he sighs a weary sigh. He is getting too old for this. The sun saps his energy in a way it never used to do, and he has less time in his garden these days than he could stand when he was younger. Of course, in those days, he pretty much left the garden to take care of itself. Such is the limited foresight of youth. He must go in and rest for the evening, but the day has been well spent, and because of his roses, he can still read and enjoy a good steak for dinner. But as he goes to sleep for the night, he will fail to hear the rabbit digging under the fence and nibbling away at fresh thyme.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Took me a while to find this one.
PPS - I wanted something just a bit different this week.

3D technology for privacy

Using 3D technology for computer screen privacy. It might be possible to use 3D-like polarising filters with a computer monitor to keep anyone else from seeing the same thing as you on the screen. As long as the monitor is capable of displaying two different images at different polarisations, and you have glasses that can filter for only one polarisation, you could display the private stuff polarised to match the glasses and display random noise pixels polarised the other way. Anyone looking over your shoulder would see only randomness, but you with your polarised filter would see the real image. That is if you can withstand the pounding headache.

Given the generally poor state of 3D, this might not work perfectly, but it should be a little more comfortable and less conspicuous than a giant hood, and more effective than an angle restricting filter. And you wouldn't have to use it for the whole screen all the time, just for sensitive things like password fields, email or chat windows - things you'd rather not have anyone read over your shoulder.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This also assumes that nobody else has their own privacy glasses.
PPS - That's probably the biggest security hole.

Tilted touch screen desks

I think, if we're going to make desktop-sized touch screens, they should be tilted up towards us at about a 30-degree angle, like an architect's desk or drafting table. A flat desk is just not the way to work with a huge touch screen, nor is a wall panel comfortable to sit at for a whole day. But those tilted desks are just what we should have. Maybe we need flat shelves at the top or bottom to hold things so they don't roll off, but the main point here is that the touch screen itself needs to be tilted. Horizontal and vertical are not the only options, which seems to have escaped the creators of BendDesk, X-Desk and other big touch screens.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Microsoft's DigiDesk concept is close.
PPS - The demo video is all about the software, though.

Google Chrome and PDFs

Google Chrome now loads PDF files natively and much faster than Adobe Reader. So wouldn't it be worthwhile to switch the default file association to for PDFs Chrome and uninstall Adobe Reader forever? Seriously, how many weekly updates are necessary to keep loading PDFs in the slowest possible manner? How much has Adobe Reader changed for you in the past decade, and how much has it improved in speed and efficiency?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For me, the answer is "none".
PPS - To both questions.

Inception plus Facebook equals sleep socialising

If we had those dream-sharing machines from Inception, and they could operate over the internet to connect with, for instance, our Facebook friends, then we could get days of socialising done while we sleep. It would be like going to a party where the food is infinite and non-fattening, the booze is free and the consequences of your actions are only as permanent as a video game. The problems of sharing your subconscious with your friends, however, are too many to list.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also, sleeping with a needle in your arm every night might not appeal to people.
PPS - I would assume it actually works with some kind of head gear.

Kindle vs textbooks

Until electronic documents are as easy to mark up, modify, combine and carry as paper, it's likely the Kindle will not make great inroads into universities. That's a shame, because carrying one slim device would be far less cumbersome and painful than a pile of textbooks. It would seem like a major selling point.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's also hard to flip through the pages quickly to search for something.
PPS - Which I suppose you should do via keyword search if you can.

Friday Flash Fiction - High Stakes

Eight elite poker players gathered together from all over the country tonight, by anonymous invitation, for the highest-stakes game of their lives. With the prize pool taken from a ten million dollar buy-in (each), who could resist? There was Chip Trehorn, chewing on a toothpick and hiding his twitchy eye tell under a Stetson hat, Black Jack with the scarred cheek, the twins, Rocky and Rolo, and Lady Cooper, who was not really named Cooper nor, by all accounts, was she much of a Lady either.

The stacks of chips grew and shrank for hours among the evenly-matched players. Nobody looked set to pull ahead until the Ginger Ninja, in his bright orange hood, bluffed on a pair of sevens and lost it all. Slowly, the players were knocked out one by one, and by the time the sun rose on that dim, smoky club, Lady Cooper had emerged victorious, to the reluctant congratulations of her fellow players. It was only then that they discovered the club's mysterious owner was nowhere to be found, and neither was their collective eighty million dollars of buy-in cash.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Please let me know what you think.
PPS - Part of the reason I'm doing this is for feedback.

In charge of entertainment

Who is really in charge of the entertainment industry? There are those with limited scope veto power, there are the writers and actors, directors and editors, publishers and distributors, then us, the audience and customers. If all of any group left, it would come undone, but the industry can survive the loss of any one person.

In a way, every song, book, TV show or movie happens not because one person wanted it, but because no one group involved didn't want it to happen. There weren't any writer strikes, the director didn't quit over creative differences, the actors didn't walk out in a huff and the crew didn't down tools for more money. Because all of those things didn't happen, a completed product comes out the other end of the pipeline.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There does have to be some actual work, too.
PPS - Or else things that don't happen would result in spontaneous entertainment everywhere.

Gaming services vs piracy

Gaming as a service (eg OnLive, aka "cloud gaming", aka "gaming on demand") is probably the only way big budget games will be produced in the next generation of consoles and desktops. You subscribe to a service for a flat fee and get access to their whole library of games, but you play over the network - it's like a highly interactive video stream. It's the only way you can truly prevent piracy in the sense of copied games, and it works because they're interactive. Capturing the video and sound that comes down the wire only gets you a demo video, not a game you can give to your friends.

While I think it's good that there's a business model out there for games in a post-copying era, it will also shape the direction our technology takes from then on, and will mean that you can never play games without a network connection again. You can't even deal with a slow connection, because it has to be big enough to support twitch-fast video and audio. So I'm a little conflicted about this, and I cringe to think of where it might end up, but I don't think I can stop it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I just hope there won't be too many competing services with exclusive games.
PPS - But I don't want one provider in a monopoly, either.

Touch keyboards versus QWERTY

It's good that people are trying to rethink they keyboard for a touch-screen age, because it's not really an interaction method that carries over very well from the typewriter age to touch screens, big or small. We have Swype that works via continuous touch, BlindType that anticipates where you imagine the keyboard to be and some more unusual designs like 8pen, a radial touch pad with circular gestures for each letter. Nobody has the answer just yet, though. I wonder what we'll eventually settle on. Whatever it is, I'm fairly sure it won't be a QWERTY keyboard forever.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And it will probably work pretty well without looking.
PPS - Google liked BlindType so much, they bought it for Android.

Family data sharing

I'm very interested in family data sharing and backup. For instance, how do you share your family photos between houses? I'm sure there are some photos among your family of which specific people want copies, and that can easily be seen as a kind of backup, too. The problem is how you do so when Uncle Frank doesn't have a computer and Aunt Betty lives three hours away and only has a very limited internet connection? It's all well and good to point people at an internet file sync service like Dropbox or Live Mesh, but sometimes it's not an option. So what do you do?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If Uncle Frank has no computer, it's probably going to be more difficult.
PPS - But what about a digital photo frame and a big flash drive as a present?

Getting rich at the expense of others

"The love of money is a root for all kinds of evil" - Jesus.
"I wanna be a billionaire, so frickin' bad" - Travie Mccoy.

See a problem? It's not just that, though. Getting rich, quickly or slowly, is a zero sum game. That is, if you get richer, someone else has, as a direct result, become poorer. So part of what you're saying if you want to be richer is that you want everyone else to be poorer. Any way you look at it, that's just mean.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wish I could link to "Chase The Dollar" by Gerald here.
PPS - Both because it would help make my point, and because I like the song.

Sticky note programs

There are lots of programs that simulate sticky notes for your computer. Windows 7 even comes with one built in. And I've just figured out why I don't like them: you only ever get as much space to physically arrange them as you have on your computer desktop. It's as if someone gave you free reign to write whatever you want on an infinite stack of index cards, and arrange them however you want, but only within a tiny little tray. As soon as you try to store any decent amount of information there, you'll run into problems.

Scrolling and zooming are hardly new concepts in software, but apparently these sticky note programs haven't caught up to that point yet.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm sure I'd lose track of some of my notes on an infinite canvas.
PPS - So maybe it's not the final answer.

Friday Flash Fiction - Life Sentence

They sentenced Jeremiah Livingstone-Tannin to three hundred years in prison for three brutal murders. It stayed on the books, though the Old West rose and fell, and Jeremiah kept on ticking away in prison, serving his time. Occasionally a warden or a guard would catch a glimpse of him smiling that too-white smile with the teeth a little sharper than you'd think would be possible. But they shook their heads as if waking from a dream and the image was gone.

He was a model prisoner, and never in fights, neither starting nor finishing them. Nobody ever seemed to ask why he didn't age, or didn't eat at mealtimes. And three hundred years after his incarceration, to the very day, the warden released Jeremiah Livingstone-Tannin, though for some reason he insisted they let him out at midnight. Just as he was walking out of view, the guard would later swear, Jeremiah spread that old dark cloak of his, and took off like a bat in the night.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've (already) grown tired of Friday Photo. I think this idea is more my style.
PPS - Besides, everyone takes photos.

Email and collaboration

When you really think about it, email sucks as a collaboration tool. Either you need to keep copying everyone on every message so they know what's going on, even if you're just passing on a message, because some people might not know that someone else has been informed of something. Maintaining that list of who needs to know what (and who needs to know who knows what) is a major hassle.

That's even before you get to the point of editing documents as a group, where multiple people can be emailing multiple versions of multiple documents so often that it's not even clear what the most recent versions are, let alone whose job it is to merge them into one.

There are solutions, but they tend to be online (where businesses don't trust the data storage) or don't mesh with Microsoft Office. So we stick with that one old tool, email, that doesn't quite get the job done, but manages to do most of what we need.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The core problem is solved.
PPS - It's the migration and market share that we need now.

Simulation games for university training

How much can simulation games help with university training? For instance, designing and operating a mine could be simulated and, as long as the game doesn't do too many of the calculations itself, it could be a very helpful learning experience for budding mining engineers. Given that same software, though, real mining engineers could probably benefit too. You'd just have to swap out the gaming aspects and some of the simulation for real-world measurement.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For all I know, not being a mining engineer, they do this already.
PPS - I also haven't been to university lately.

Arguments and assumptions

Everything stands up to its own logic. It's the assumptions you have to question. I prefer to argue by challenging your assumptions. It's like that old saying, whoever defines the terms, wins the debate. The best way (often the only way) to counter-argue is to question the definitions, not the arguments built on them. The definitions, properly or maliciously crafted, will have the wrong assumptions behind them, and you need to point that out if you're going to argue with any hope of success.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I do enjoy a good debate.
PPS - But I never got into the formal kind.

Taking over the world

How would you take over the world with infinite cash but only one year? Most of us have all the time in the world, but not enough money to, say, hollow out a volcano or take the moon hostage. But what if those limits were reversed? You'd have all the cash you could imagine, but a time limit of 365 days. So what would you do if, one year from today, you wanted to be remembered forever as the ultimate ruler of the world?

Personally, I'd probably start with something boring like buying up all the biggest corporations and paying off everyone's mortgages. Then I'd be not only in charge of the biggest, most powerful companies in the world, but every home owner would be on my side too.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then I'd start on the assassinations.
PPS - Soon enough I'd be the only one willing to run any country.

Standard device chargers

I would appreciate one standard device charger when travelling. Right now I have one each per phone (for Debbie and me), one for the camera, one for the laptop and one for the iPod. I realise they're a bit different, but surely that's not the best we can do. They all take up so much space and get tangled together so easily that it seems like more trouble than it should be.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've seen DC converters with multiple attachments and settings.
PPS - That's not quite what I want, but it's a start.

Conflicting demands

It's difficult to have your management goals met if you issue conflicting demands to your employees. For instance, if you demand that software documentation be kept up to date at all times, but also say that writing documentation is non-chargeable time and that all employees should maximise their chargeable time, then you will have a conflict where you are actually telling employees not to do documentation. That's just an example. It is not currently happening to me.

The point is, at a high level, you might not seem to have any contradictions in your goals, but when you break them down to their real meanings for day to day work, you might find them working against each other.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And then one is going to dominate the others.
PPS - It might not be the one you want.

Supply, demand and digital distribution

When digital copies are abundant and selling like mad, should the price be lower or higher? I think that's probably looking at the problem backwards. A lower price drives demand, and because the supply never runs out, you don't have an incentive as the supplier to raise prices in order to maximise your profit. The lower the price, the more people will buy your movie, book or music and vice versa. Already music and book downloads are settling into a $1-per-unit price model, simply because that's where the maximum demand and profit lies. Movies and TV shows will probably get there too. It's just a matter of time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I look forward to those times.
PPS - Then they just need to get rid of the DRM and I'll actually start buying things.

Ticket scalping vs buying for gifts

Ticket vendors need to try and protect against scalping just as a part of their business. The problem is that ticket scalping and buying as a gift are identical transactions from an information point of view. Defending against one by necessity prevents the other. That is, if I'm buying two tickets for two friends, that looks exactly the same to a ticket vendor as if I were buying two tickets to sell to the highest bidder.

You might say I can include the names of the intended recipients at the time of purchase, but what if I'm buying ten tickets together in good faith that I have ten friends to bring with me, but I don't know which ones they will be yet? You can't just ask me to provide the names later, because that would enable me to scalp the tickets to strangers and provide their names. And what if I meet a brand new person after buying the ticket, and decide to bring them along? Well, that looks like scalping even if you have some way of verifying friendships and family relationships up front.

There's no winning here. You either have to accept a certain amount of scalping or stop selling tickets entirely.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Clearly nobody is going to stop selling if that's their business.
PPS - At least not until it's unprofitable.

Opposing monopolies

Products that oppose monopolies are important, such as Google's Android phone operating system, alternative web browsers like Firefox and Chrome, and the Linux OS. It's never a good situation for consumers when one company holds a monopoly - actual or just practical - over platforms and distribution channels. That's why Apple and Linux are important for computer operating systems and it's why iTunes and Facebook are such problems. It's not that they are bad, as such, just that they have no external point of reference.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's the capitalist version of the contrary point of view.
PPS - Without that opposition, products and services grow stale and evil.

Friday Photo - Roma Sunset

This is a sunset at Roma, Queensland, taken some time in 2009. I had to borrow a tripod to keep the camera steady in the low light.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'll be back there for Easter this year.
PPS - And it probably won't be the last time.

Engineering and details

It is an engineer's job to go from vague description to detailed design. Better tools make the process easier, but also expand the scope of what we consider possible. So we think in terms of bigger projects, which also means we pay attention to fewer details at that level. The engineer's job is to make sure those little details you forgot all work together in a cohesive whole. Engineering will never be obsolete. It will just change thanks to better tools that alter what we think of as small details.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wonder how much detail tomorrow's engineers will have to manage.
PPS - Probably about the same, but they won't look like today's details.

Platform stability

Google's Android mobile operating system is suffering (or thriving, depending on who you ask) from a glut of customised versions. Knowing which apps will run on which phones and whether yours will behave correctly (or whether your phone company has accidentally or maliciously crippled it) is like rolling the dice. You never quite know. I think the nintendo DS is being eroded a little by the many different versions. We are also starting down a similar path with point of sale systems. Right now there are three competing systems in Australia: magnetic stripe, chip-and-pin, and RFID. It's not so much a problem for consumers yet, but I can imagine businesses being annoyed at the competing systems and the constant upgrade treadmill.

Platform stability is important for consumers. You want to know that what you buy today will be supported tomorrow, and that it's not a waste of time and money to invest in it. We have Betamax anxiety about every new consumer technology, especially when backwards compatibility is seen as a stifling restriction on progress.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Blu-Ray is still suffering from this.
PPS - Despite winning out against HD-DVD.

Timeline computing

Imagine your icons - your images and videos, but also your browser history and past versions of files - all arrayed on a timeline, oldest to the left, newest to the right. Finding what you were working on last Friday is a matter of scrolling back. Restoring previous versions of files just means scrolling back to where they were last changed. To remind yourself of something in the future, scroll forward and place a note there.

I don't doubt there would be some issues to work out, like finding a file if you don't remember when you last used it, or expiring old backups and managing hard drive space, but could you see yourself using a computer interface that was built around a timeline? It wouldn't have to be the only way, of course.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There are a lot of ways computers could work better for us.
PPS - The main user interface usually only creeps forward in tiny increments.

Simple amateur video editing

There are certain photo correction tools that should be available for video too, like 90-degree rotation, colour correction, cropping and face recognition. For the most part, the only difference between working with video and still photos is the time element. A video is a long sequence of still frames that can each be processed or corrected in turn. For some tools, like cropping and colour correction, you might need to be careful to apply the effect to only one scene at a time, which does complicate things a lot. Still, I think it's about time some of the simple photo correction tools made their way into amateur video editing tools too, like Google Picasa (which can already rotate video).

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd be surprised if Google were not trying to do that.
PPS - I'd also expect it to take some time to do right.

Constant save

Ideally, our computers should use a system where you never need to remember to save your work at all, it just happens automatically all the time. That's how we work in the real world - you never need to "save" what you've written on paper. Creating it and keeping it are the same thing. Of course, that requires software to be written specifically for that arrangement, but then it starts feeling a lot more like something based on reality, built for you, rather than based on engineering constraints and built to suit the hardware.

If you also have a version-controlling file system with automatic remote redundancy, you'll have a very complete history of everything you've done, and backups are practically subconscious. No data will ever be lost simply because you saved over it, accidentally deleted it or even because of ordinary hardware failure.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I use Dropbox and Windows Live Mesh to get some of this behaviour.
PPS - But I'm talking about designing Windows around the idea.

Friday Photo - Port Arthur

This picture was taken at a historical jail site in Port Arthur, Tasmania. It was a few years ago now, so I don't remember specifically what that building is. It might be a chapel.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - But I think the chapel or church was bigger.
PPS - Only a few of the buildings still had roofs.

Mythbusters making myths

I can imagine Mythbusters inspiring a few myths and conspiracy theories of their own, entirely by accident. Mostly it would be of the form "that's just what they want you to think" when testing ways to beat the law. For instance, here are some of the conclusions they've drawn that might inspire this reaction:

- You can't beat the lie detector.
- You can't beat the breathalyser.
- You can't beat speed cameras, either with non-obvious plate blockers or with speed.
- You can't beat the bloodhound.
- You can't outsmart the drug dogs.

You just know there are people out there wilfully disbelieving those things.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also, you aren't being implanted with mind-control chips when you donate blood.
PPS - At least that's what they told me.

The contrary point of view

Every king needs a fool to mock him. Every trial needs a devil's advocate. The contrary point of view must not be silenced, because by that process we utterly lose our perspective. Anywhere an assertion is made - science, politics, religion, film-making, book editing - there should be someone whose job it is to be the "no" man.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Plus I think it would be cool to see court jesters following CEOs around.
PPS - Who wouldn't like to see that?

Mental and physical games

I want there to be a game that is as much a mental challenge as physical, but not forced like chess boxing or only mental for the coach like gridiron. I want a game where you as a player will only succeed if you are mentally and physically fit and can use both of those skills at once. Maybe what I'm thinking of is some kind of obstacle course maze.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Maybe it's unnecessary.
PPS - Because there are enough games to challenge either mind or body.

Culture and skills

Culture breeds expertise and skills. If you have a culture of valuing problem-finding and solving, then you will grow a skill set in your people of finding and fixing problems. If you have a culture of security and safety, you will encourage your people to develop skills related to keeping things secure and safe. If you have a culture of blame and surveillance, however, you will only encourage your people to learn to shift blame and avoid surveillance or rat out their co-workers for personal glory. Before long, you'd find your organisation feeding on itself so that some bits look successful at the expense of others. Soon after that, you need constant new hires (AKA "meat for the grinder") or you'll collapse and die.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's not good to be one of those corporations.
PPS - My employer is not like that.

Google, truth and knowledge

We have gathered the information of the world. It is indexed, it is accessible and easily referenced. But it is missing something. Google is the world's best, biggest and fastest card catalogue, but the information still needs processing. What does it mean and what parts are true? Wolfram Alpha is a different story, but is still quite limited.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We still need experts.
PPS - And ways to find them.

Good programs and good programmers

You're never going to get good programs from non-programmers, regardless of the tools, just like you can't get good dentistry from non-dentists or good flying from non-pilots. As soon as you're getting good programs from someone, by definition, they are a programmer. But the tools are always advancing, so the things we do and call "programming" today are the automated tasks of programmers' tools tomorrow. And, at least in theory, the tools should advance and branch out so that more people can do tomorrow what only programmers can do today.

In contrast with "good programs equals programmer", if you only ever get bad programs from someone, are they therefore not a programmer, even if they've been hired and trained as one?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There's a Venn diagram in there somewhere.
PPS - But it might not be worth the effort.

Friday Photo - Pokolbin

This is the view from a winery called Tuscany Wine Estate Resort in Pokolbin, New South Wales. As a photo, I'm moderately happy with it. The colour looks a little washed out, and the muddy grass with the drain could use some Photoshop expertise.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It doesn't do the real view any justice.
PPS - Few photos do, though.

Therapy and enabling

Is there a difference in therapy between enabling someone in their illness and changing their circumstances so they can cope? For an agoraphobe, it can hardly be said to be therapeutic to allow them to remain at home all the time, but to force them outside into their panic state as much as everyone else goes outside would be a wrong extreme too. You don't want to allow someone like that to fully withdraw from reality, but at the same time, you don't expect the same level of interaction from them that you would from others.

At some point you have to be able to say "That's enough for today", but how much is enough? I imagine it's hard for therapists to push their patients into uncomfortable situations and leave them there long enough to do some good, but not long enough to do permanent harm. But if you go too far in the "do no harm" direction, you're helping them stay sick.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not speaking from any personal experience.
PPS - On either side of the issue.

Incomplete tools

External documentation is a signal that a tool is not doing its whole job, or was under-designed. We have a ticket tracking website we use at work, and a OneNote page to track who needs to follow up which tickets where and how. If the ticket tracking software was up to scratch, it would handle that follow-up info on its own, without requiring external documentation.

It's always a pain to keep them in sync, too, which is the primary reason it's a problem. If the tool doesn't hold and manage all the data you need it to manage, you'll end up with at least a second list, extra data entry time and effort as well as occasionally out of date data in one or the other location. So you start mistrusting one data store and don't bother with it any more, leading to its eventual death. If one tool is no good without the other, it will not work to keep two tools manually in sync.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - "Manual sync" should always be a red flag phrase.
PPS - And "red flag phrase" should be a tongue-twister.

Personal data organisation

How do you store and organise your semi-structured data? Do you make lists on paper? Do you file them in any system? Do you have a card index? I struggle sometimes with the amount of data I store, and not all of it has to do with work. I have a lot of text files that grow and grow, lists of TV and DVDs to watch and buy, logs of the time I've spent at work, not to mention my ongoing work diary and personal journal, plus emails, address books and non-time-related writing on various topics not for blogging, but just to lay things out in my mind.

It bothers me that I've never found even a few systems that can handle this to any degree of consistency, availability and robustness. Databases are generally too structured and require tools I don't always have with me. Spreadsheets would be good, but they'd quickly become too large to manage by hand. Text files are clearly inadequate, or else I wouldn't be looking to anything else, and wouldn't be frustrated with them.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm probably after a personal wiki.
PPS - But no personal wiki system has ever struck me as adequate either.

Really jumping on eggs without breaking them

Some time ago, a video from the BBC's past resurfaced online - a man "jumping on eggs without breaking them". He seems to be a little short on real skill (he's just touching an egg with one foot while jumping), and it's quite embarassing on his behalf, but it reminded me of a story I read years ago. There was a man, I wish I could find his name, who used to do stunts like this with two large weights held in his hands. By swinging the weights, he could change his momentum and, for instance, jump on eggs with *both* feet and back off without breaking them, leap over a cart horse from a standing start, and jump over a body of water in two hops, looking like he bounced on the water in the middle. That seems like one of those impressive skills you might find on YouTube these days, but nobody seems to have done it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The trouble is that my search terms keep bringing up this other guy.
PPS - And I no longer have the book where I read about it.

Learning language

How do babies learn language? Spoken nouns ("dog!"), spoken verbs, basic sentences, then reading, then writing. Why don't we teach adults second languages that way? Most of the time we act like the best way to learn a language is to present entire abstract phrases in your native language, then learn to read and write them in the new language you want to learn.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course it gets harder the older you get.
PPS - Personally I want audio-visual flash cards.

Friday Photo - Maitland

This is my attempt at an arty picture of a room we stayed in for a friend's wedding last weekend.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Not bad, if I do say so myself.
PPS - The wedding was in Pokolbin and we stayed in Maitland.

Tablet computers as primary devices

Would you be happy with a tablet computer as your main machine? If it were powerful enough, I'd say yes. I expect I would a least have a dock with a real keyboard on my desk though. The biggest problem I can imagine is screen space. Tablets just don't have the room to move that I need for my work.

I think, at some point in the future, the power of phones will have increased to such a degree that they are our primary computing devices. When we want to use them at home, we'll have docks with standard connections that we can drop them into, from which they will power desktop screens and full-size keyboards.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or maybe most of our software will change to match small screens and touch.
PPS - A lot of it is changing that way already.

Context-aware video resizing

I watched a demo of seam carving for video retargeting. Basically, they're cutting out the "most boring" bits of video frames to resize video in a context-aware way. It's not perfect, especially when there are big foreground objects, but it's a cool effect to see. The seams they were using were across all frames and intended to resize vertically or horizontally.

I wonder what would happen if you applied the seams in the time dimension, cutting out dynamic frames to "retarget" a video to a shorter time. There's nothing in the algorithm that would prevent doing so, and I think the results would be pretty interesting. It would probably come out looking a bit hyperactive. For instance, if two people were talking in turn, such an algorithm might cut out the parts where each person is not talking, compressing the conversation until the participants just talk over each other the whole time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In some movies, you might not notice the difference.
PPS - And some important scenes might go missing because they're too visually simple.

Procrastination

Recognising procrastination is important but it is also important to recognise the underlying reason. Whenever you're procrastinating, it's likely because of something you want to avoid. Why are you avoiding that? Is it just because it's unpleasant? Do you not know where to start? Do you fear you'll fail or let someone down? After finding out why you're procrastinating, you also need to decide what you can do about it. Sometimes (usually) the answer is to just grow some discipline and get started. Sometimes, however, the task you've been avoiding doesn't need to get done at all, or really requires a different approach than the one you were putting off. In that case, you should either remove the item from your action list or replan and take a different approach.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My usual reason is fear of failure.
PPS - Which is very counter-productive, since it leads to certain failure.

Life-critical learning

Someone has to get the first time surgeons. If you told the patient that their surgeon had never done this before, nobody would take that chance. But then we'd quickly run out of surgeons because the new ones aren't able to learn properly. At some point, someone has to take the chance on a new surgeon, or a pilot on their first trip, or the air traffic controller on his first day. I wonder how often we trust our lives to the (technically) inexperienced.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I bet it's more often than we think.
PPS - But probably not alarmingly often.

When recycled is normal

I wonder at what point we will start assuming things are clean and green, environmentally friendly, and change over to labelling harmful items with a warning. A lot of companies and products these days are trying to project a "green" image, so much so that it's expected. So before long it won't be remarkable or boast-worthy any more, it will be the norm to expect products to be recyclable and made from recycled materials. At that point we switch from proudly displaying the fact that such-and-such is the greenest product or company around to pointing out those that are not.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - At that point, progress would have to accelerate.
PPS - Because nobody wants the "WARNING: TOXIC" sticker on their product.

Friday Photo - Ballina Sunrise

A classic from the archives, several years ago. This was taken at sunrise one day on camp. That's me on the right. This was my Windows desktop for a long time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Sorry for not posting one of these for a while.
PPS - I just sort of ran low on material.

Somewhat perfect

Perfection needs to be defined in order to be sought. Usually there are too many trade-offs for something to hit 100% on all axes. For example, what is the perfect car? Is it one that can carry your entire family plus a month of groceries, one that costs very little to run, one that's super-safe or one that goes extremely fast? You're not going to get all of those factors in one car. At most, you'll get two, and as a result will bottom out the others - a fast car that holds your whole family will cost a fortune to run. A fast safe one will hold a driver and nothing else. A big, efficient car won't be very fast. The point is that there is no such thing as absolute perfection, which means there is no such thing as absolute progress. Instead, we just have fitness for a particular purpose and change.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The trick is to recognise what is and is not a trade-off situation.
PPS - Which can be tricky.

Future computing looks a lot like today's

The things we tend to see in video demos of "future computing" are super-thin touch-screen phones, translucent LCDs, wall-sized interactive "whiteboards" and gestural interfaces for just about everything including data transfer. That's all good, and quite exciting, but it represents little more than "better, faster iPhones" to me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Someone out there must have more imagination than that.
PPS - Or perhaps imagination is a dying skill.

Vocabulary of the future

Science fiction writers often seem to use new words or terms for the inevitable next generation of technology, like '3D So-Vi' for television or 'time teller' for clock. The problem is that words have momentum that's hard to overcome. People were referring to "ice boxes" long after they required no ice. I frequently say I'm going to rent a video when I mean a DVD. I've even heard a television referred to as a "picture wireless". If those terms persisted, then "television" and "clock" will, too, and, English being English, the simplest word is likely to win.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - But how will you know it's the future unless they have weird words for things?
PPS - I think the jet packs will give it away.

Replacing Space Quest

While cleaning out a cupboard the other day, I found my old Space Quest game boxes. I've held on to them because they had great sentimental value to me. They were some of the first games I played and loved, not to mention the fact that the boxes contained all those extra goodies that game boxes used to, like maps, comics, collectible pieces and manuals. The trouble with these games now is that they are contained on floppy discs of both the 3.5" and 5.25" variety, and I have no way of actually reading them, let alone checking their integrity.

I would, theoretically, replace them with the Space Quest Collection, an updated version on CD or DVD, but this is unavailable in Australia because ... actually, why is that? It's also on Steam, but banned from sale in Australia, since that would obviously be too much trouble. In short, these games are still technically available for sale, only not where I live, for no apparent reason.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The only reason to ban their sale on Steam would be to sell them another way.
PPS - Or because you hate money.

Helicopter-like parachutes

Could we use passive helicopter-like rotors instead of a parachute? There's a manoever possible with helicopters alled "autorotation" that allows for (relatively) safe landing in the event of engine failure. The same idea might work for a one-person backpack helicopter. I'm not a pilot, though, nor am I familiar enough with helicopter physics (or Wile E. Coyote gadget designs) to say whether it would really work.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - From videos, it still looks difficult.
PPS - So probably not a great idea, but interesting.

Internet-famous

The internet enables much more niche-targeted interest groups, each with their own micro-celebrities. This means an end to mega stars because we can all indulge our more specific tastes and focus on people who match them better than one-personality-fits-all celebrities. It also changes the definition of "famous", where one person may be famous among their tiny subculture of, say, cereal box art enthusiasts, whose members are spread across the world (and in that sense, "world famous") but utterly unknown elsewhere.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess, if you fracture society enough, everyone is famous.
PPS - But by then, what's the point?

Protecting you from candid photography

Most mobile phone cameras have an artificial shutter sound, designed to alert you to candid photography. It's not just a user feedback mechanism, or else there would be a way to turn it off. It is actually meant to protect other people from your camera. Here are some situations where it does not achieve its goal: loud places (concerts or even just a busy street), long distance, crowds (can't see), too quick (snap and run), deaf, distracted, listening to an iPod. And that's if you don't manage to turn the sound off through some other means. So the only real thing it has accomplished is annoying users.

Anyone who wants to take photos without you knowing will do so whether their phone makes noise or not. But all of that is not even the most serious problem, which is that the photo, by the time the noise is made, has already been taken. It's too late already. And these days those photos can be on the internet as fast as the button is pressed, so you can't even chase them down and prevent it going further with confidence. What you really want, in this type of alert system, is flashing lights and very loud sirens that go off for a full minute before the shutter. That way you can be alerted to the presence of the camera and take preventative action before the photo is taken.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Which is, of course, ridiculous.
PPS - And would be impossible to enforce.

Preventing phones in prisons

Apparently phones are being smuggled into prisons at an alarming rate, and it seems like a losing battle trying to keep them out. So if you can't keep phones out of prisons, you can make them useless with a faraday cage, which prevents radio waves getting in or out. And this is exactly one of those circumstances where such expensive measures may be justified. Rather than spending a fortune trying to search for phones in prisons, admit limited defeat on that front and prevent their actual use. Or set up a local, fake phone tower for them to latch onto, which just swallows up everything that goes into it. That might be a problem for anyone living, working or driving by the local area, though.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Both of these measures would adversely affect guards and visitors, too.
PPS - Maybe that's acceptable.

Google encrypted search

Google has an encrypted web search option, running over SSL, which should keep third parties from reading your web traffic, but exactly how much does it protect you? Your ISP still needs to know where to send your requests, and it knows what those IP addresses mean, so they're going to know which websites you're on, even if they don't know what you're doing there. And the same will go for your employer, if you're trying to use encrypted search at work. Also, if you're signed in to your Google account while you search over SSL, your search terms will still be listed in your Google history.

So what actually gets hidden? The contents of what you search for, but not where you go after that, and not the fact that you're performing searches on a secure connection to Google. To keep the actual destination of your browsing a secret, you'd need an encrypted VPN to reroute the traffic.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Privacy and security get more complicated all the time.
PPS - But they've always been particularly difficult on the net.

Piracy vs obscurity

The only thing worse than having your work pirated is not having it pirated. The only things that stop piracy are obscurity and indifference, neither of which translate to monetary success. If your work is popular, it is going to be copied, and if your business relies on that being difficult or rare, it's going to fail eventually. Your business model needs to allow copying or, better yet, thrive on it. That might be enticing people to come to your concerts by putting clips on YouTube and encouraging ticket-holders to do the same.

YouTube will never replace the experience of actually being there, and live experiences can't be copied. This may mean we return to live-action shows rather than movies, and concerts rather than CDs. They have value because time and space are genuinely scarce, while digital copies are not, and monetary value (in this case) derives from scarcity.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Prepare for a full-scale Broadway revival, planet Earth.
PPS - But not until the movie cinemas start to die out.

Windows Live Mesh

I've installed and evaluated another media synchronisation tool: Windows Live Mesh. The setup seems more slick than other programs I've tried, and it keeps the options simple to keep the program usable. This means it misses the mark on bandwidth limiting and scheduling, too, but allows me to set up any number of sync folders that I want, and does them peer-to-peer. It synchronises over the local network when possible, so no bandwidth is used to keep things up to date between my home machines.

The one little problem is that it convinced itself there were 20 files changed on one machine that, in fact, do not exist. No matter what happens, whether I remove and re-add machines to that sync profile (My Music) or create dummy files to pretend to be the ones in waiting, it is perpetually waiting for these imaginary files that will never exist. The only advice available online for fixing this tiny problem is to uninstall the entire program, reinstall it, then set up all your synchronisation again, on every machine. For me, that's four machines and over 20GB of data, so that's a giant red mark on the Live Mesh score card. Other than that, I endorse it by the fact that I am currently still using it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I previously reviewed Libox.
PPS - I uninstalled that one after just one day.

The Source Code

There is a movie coming out soon where people use a device and - importantly - some software called "The Source Code" to travel back in time to relive the last 8 minutes of a person's life and investigate crimes or disasters. The one point I want to make is that "Source Code" is a silly name for a program, specifically because source code is what programmers like me write. It becomes the program, when you run it through a compiler, but calling the resulting program "Source Code" is like calling a finished movie "Undeveloped Film".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not sure if I'll see the movie.
PPS - The trailer didn't grab me, beyond that one point.

Distracted driving

Talking on a mobile phone in a car, whether on hands-free or holding the phone to your ear, is a bad distraction. Either way you don't have enough attention on the road, and our road rule makers are starting to wake up to this fact. What will this mean in the future? Well, for one thing, we won't get any more car stereos with built-in Bluetooth for hands-free phone operation. There may also be some subtleties in the rules about using a dashboard-mounted phone as a navigation device (or dedicated nav devices, too). And if it's bad talking on the phone, surely it's bad to drive with misbehaving kids in the back too. How much distraction are we going to allow a driver to have, and how do we measure it? Perhaps it's time we got car manufacturers all working on robot chauffeurs built into our cars and left human drivers on the race track.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I have a feeling it would change more things than we intend.
PPS - It would seriously cut into the taxi business, for one.

The business of education

Universities and other education institutions don't care if there are jobs out there to fill. They only care whether there are students enough to fill their classes and campuses. If every single person in the world wanted to study nothing but fingerpainting, universities would be all too happy to furnish them with a useless four-year degree on the subject. When their fingerpainting careers failed to take off because everyone else in the world is a similarly dismal artist who doesn't want anyone else's fingerpaintings, can they sue the university for being misleading or not providing them with relevant job skills? Not at all. You came here to learn fingerpainting, and that's what you got. Payment received, service provided, exactly as described, end of story.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - People have tried to sue their universities for providing irrelevant degrees.
PPS - Seems like blame-shifting for a bad choice.

Friday Photo - Brisbane By Night

Taken from the Kookaburra Queen on the river on Valentine's Day, this is the best of the batch.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The others were a bit blurred by the motion of the boat.
PPS - They all look fairly similar to this one, though.

The Dawkins Delusion

Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion denounced all religion on the basis of suicide bombers and other obviously crazy people. Anybody can do that, and plenty have. The problem is that it's similar to saying all clowns are evil because some people in clown makeup rob convenience stores.

What would have been actually impressive would be to show, logically and step-by-step, that religion is patently dangerous because it leads to people like Mother Theresa. If Dawkins could show, irrefutably, that the most well-known and best example of Christian goodness was a blight on the world, then he would be saying something worth hearing. As it is, he has cut off the worst end of a long continuum of religious morality, leaving a very large part unaccounted for.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If he could have done it the other way, I'm sure he would have.
PPS - Personally, I can't imagine such an argument.

Privacy and security

It's important not to confuse privacy with secrecy. Privacy is control over who has access to what information. Security is the mechanism by which we exercise that control. This is important to remember when Mark Zuckerberg claims Facebook users do not want privacy. He's not ONLY saying they don't want their information to be secure, but claiming further that they do not want to be able to control who sees what on their Facebook profiles, which is crazy talk of a whole different level.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You can have privacy and security together.
PPS - And you must aim for it.

The Green Hornet as actual criminal mastermind

The only difference between the Green Hornet and any other aspiring crime lord is motivation. The only thing that makes the plan of posing as criminals just a front is the fact that he and Kato don't actually set up their own criminal empire in place of what they tear down.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - They let someone else do that.
PPS - I suppose, on balance, it would work out, at least at the top.

Outsourced utility bargain hunting

It should be possible to outsource your utility bargain hunting. You'd sign up with a utilities broker and they make sure you get the best deals on electricity, phone, internet and so on. So far most places that do this offer it as a one-off connection service and are in bed with alternative providers. I'm talking about paying ABC Utilities for your electricity, water, phone, gas and internet in one bill, trusting that they will find you the best prices for each individual service, or the best bundled price for some. It might be a difficult business model unless your operating costs are low, since you'd have to take a cut for every client which might eat up their incentive to pay you instead of bargain-hunting on their own.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Unless the stress of bargain-hunting is too much.
PPS - Which it might be, for some people.

Suggestions vs browsing

The benefits of book stores and magazines over internet search is finding things you weren't looking for. Online suggestions features do offset this to some degree, but you'll probably never find a whole new genre of entertainment that appeals to you via suggestions on Amazon.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Personal recommendations from a friend are still the best form of advertising.
PPS - But you can't engineer that easily.

Friday Photo - Stick Peace

I found these sticks in our courtyard, hastily arranged them and snapped the photo above. I think it works.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Sticks can make peace.
PPS - If you use them properly.

DRM denial of service

In Die Hard 3 ("With a Vengeance"), the tactics of the bad guys constitute a denial of service attack on the police. First, they occupy everyone looking for a bomb in a school, then get them off their radios to slow down their communication. The same thing can happen with DRM systems. If your DRM scheme involves requests to a server on the internet (as most of them do), it could be vulnerable to a denial of service attack where all of your customers start requesting licenses at once. Or else someone with malicious intent starts directing a lot of traffic at your license server. And this exact problem has happened before.

Some people might say "so what, big crybaby, can't you get by without your games for a few minutes?" but with games being a bigger business than movies these days, and most of our entertainment consisting of movies, TV, music and games, plus representing most of our piracy too, server-based DRM has become more common and will continue to become more widespread. And all it would take is a large, sustained denial of service event to make people wonder exactly what good it does them as consumers.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then, of course, it would only take a week or two for everyone to forget it again.
PPS - Because we have such short atten- OOH, LOOK! SHINY!

Automated tailoring

It should be possible to step into a laser-measurement booth, take your measurements, choose a style and have a new garment custom produced on the spot. It might waste a bit of fabric, and it might be quick and shoddy, too, but if the world moves any further towards disposable fashion, then these highly trendy clothes don't even need to last long at all. Plus they'd be a perfect fit.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And you could re-stitch them if you wanted them to last longer.
PPS - Or just get new ones.

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...