Can't text. Driving.

I've seen a couple of ads trying to get people to stop texting while driving by responding with "#X". It's meant to be a shorthand to let people know you're driving and so won't be responding to texts for a while. However, there are a few problems.

First, unless you know what "#X" means, if you get a text like that, it's not going to make sense, and the problem persists. In the ads, a person receives "#X", pronounces the person responsible and proceeds with their day in a good mood. The person who doesn't receive the "#X", however, keeps texting, being ignored and growing more furious. If you don't understand it, however, the "#X" won't solve that problem. It needs to be something you discuss with people.
Second, why "#X" at all? The ads all show people about to start driving, receiving a text and responding with the tag. But if you're not driving *yet*, why do we need a code? Just text "Driving. Can't respond." or something similar. Same effect. The only reason to make "#X" a standard is to be a quick response you can dash off *WHILE DRIVING* which defeats the whole purpose.

Third, if you really want this to be a thing, what you need is for the phone OS to change. Monitor the phone's physical speed via GPS. If it's over a certain speed, there will be no text alerts and, optionally, you can have it respond automatically with "Driving. Can't respond." No need for an ad campaign or a special tag, just a more considerate phone OS or a Don't-Text-And-Drive app.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm fairly sure I'm not the only one who's had that idea.
PPS - In fact, here's one you can use now.

One format for digital publishing

People want there to be one choice for buying ebooks, I think, because they're sick of the incompatibility between platforms. I want to be able to buy books from anywhere I want and read them anywhere I want, too. Right now, because the big ebook publishers/retailers are locking down their wares to a single device and platform (a dedicated app per retailer is lock-in, regardless of how many operating systems it runs on), the simplicity of a compatible format is just a dream and the only way to get what we want is to choose one retailer over the others.

The retailers, of course, are all on board with that plan, despite it being terrible for their customers. We as consumers need options. We need competition, and that means compatibility. We need the retailers to stop their monkey-feces-flinging fights, their indiscriminate use of padlocks nobody asked for, and start serving their customers out of necessity. We need them to drop DRM. On everything, right now. The fact that we as consumers, so far, are going along with the DRM lock-in, even defending our chosen retailers, means that we are not understanding the stakes of the game. If Amazon "wins" the ebook publishing "war", everyone loses, including the authors who publish with them and the readers who chose Kindle. And of course everyone else loses, too.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If you don't stand to personally gain from Amazon being the only winner, you shouldn't defend them.
PPS - And definitely don't fight for them.

Getting better or worse

Is the world getting better or worse or is it possible that more good and bad things are all being brought to our attention, and we pay mind to what we think the world is already like?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It kind of makes a mockery of both pessimism and optimism.
PPS - And it leaves me wondering what I should make of humanity in general.

Facing anxiety

I want to face my fears so I can learn to stand up to them, but the problem is that most of my fears are social anxieties. I fear having nothing to say. I fear being perceived as boring. I fear making small talk with strangers. I fear being judged and lauged at. I fear being inadequate at my job and letting people down. Facing those types of fears doesn't make for a great story. You can't jump out of a plane and say it's done, because it's an ongoing battle. It's something you just have to deal with, every day, and it never goes away.

Imagine you live up in the clouds, like on The Jetsons, and the only way out is by parachute. Every day you have to strap on that chute and jump, and every night you come back home, up in the clouds. Now imagine that, somehow, you never get used to it. Every day you worry that, today, maybe your chute won't open, or the cross-winds will blow you into the ocean, or the straps will break, and the fear just grabs you every morning. Maybe today is the day you fail so badly you can't get up again. What would you do? If that fear stays with you, all the time, you never even get to enjoy success, because what if it's tomorrow you fail, or the next day? It becomes less a question of facing fear and more of wondering when you're going to fail.

And it's exhausting.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wish it was like jumping out of a plane.
PPS - Then I'd probably get sick of it every day.

Why I can't be a professional artist

Sometimes I think I would enjoy being an artist of some sort - an actor or a writer - to make my living. It just seems like the work would be more rewarding in and of itself than software tends to be. However, it's the peripheral stuff that would really get to me. In software, you learn someone's business, write or fix their software, move on and repeat (sticking around for anywhere from months to years at a time). Deal with a few people, network a bit, but mostly it's the programming you have to worry about. Making a living as an artist is maybe 10% about the art. The remaining 90% is about networking, politics, publicity, advertising - all the most exhausting and sleazy things I can imagine. I don't think that would suit me. Even if an agent did most of it for me, it's not their job to allow me to avoid any public appearances. Quite the opposite. I don't feel like I would do well.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I know I'm making excuses.
PPS - Mostly that's because risk is terrifying and the potential downfall is catastrophic.

Stagnant standards

One of the awkward things about technology is that we get the best use out of it when we have standards, such as common network protocols, but the most useful standards come out of ad-hoc solutions to emergent problems. So you need a way to send human-readable messages from one person to another, and we get email, but at first we get lots of different ways of sending email, which are incompatible with each other. Eventually we settle on one interoperable standard, and the world is good. Well, until Microsoft "embraces and extends" it, rendering themselves the keeper of the new ad-hoc standard. Ahem.

The other difficulty is that the standards we developed 10 years ago are now inextricably tied into absolutely everything, so even if they are no longer ideal or even vaguely appropriate, we have to keep using them because the status quo isn't going to stop or join you in a pre-emptive upgrade. HTTP 1.1 is probably the last version of that standard that will ever be produced, and the last of its kind as well. JavaScript may get some teeny-tiny upgrades, but it must maintain backwards compatibility with the websites of the 90s that it was designed to serve. Those had vastly different needs than today's interactive web applications.

So we get stuck in old standards, doing new things, and we will never be rid of them until the entire system collapses or someone tries something so fundamentally different that it demands a new ad-hoc solution.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's an odd pattern for advanced technology to take.
PPS - Or maybe it's a human pattern.

When you're allowed to fail

Always remember: you are allowed to fail. I mean, unless you've failed before at this particular thing. Or someone else is counting on you as part of their job, or you set a budget or a deadline, or it's extremely public, or if someone else gave you money to do what you're doing, or if you're talking on TV, because we'll make fun of you for that, or if you're making art that you're going to show someone. Then it's not okay to fail. But mostly, you know, as a rule, it's totally okay to fail and to learn from it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm a bit bitter about the "fail early, fail often" school of thought.
PPS - Mostly because I've never felt like I actually have permission to fail at anything.

Convenient bank opening hours

If I ran a bank, our branch opening hours would be Tuesday to Saturday, 12pm to 7pm. I figure we can keep the labour costs exactly the same, but boost customer convenience significantly. It's still only 35 opening hours per week, but now 15 of those hours are outside "normal" business hours. Banks could really do with this kind of bending-over-backwards-to-please-you attitude, given how people feel towards the entire financial sector right now. I'm not asking for much, I don't think. Just a bit of consideration that, for services like banking, regular business hours can be really inconvenient.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'll also need doctors, dentists and the post office to do this.
PPS - Actually, our dentist is open on Saturdays, and it's pretty great.

Shopping by feature

Shopping online is great. You can't beat the convenience or prices, but the research can still be a real killer, especially if you're looking for a particular kind of item (say, a car stereo) with certain features (aux and USB inputs) that are not reported by the website you're looking at. I can look at car stereos at JB HiFi, but if I don't care about the brand, just the particular features, I'm out of luck. If you need that information, you have to read every description or check the manufacturer's websites and collate it yourself.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And that can be its own kind of frustration.
PPS - I rarely care about manufacturers more than features.

Three answers to prepare for a job interview

There are three questions I prepare for in every interview: why this career, why this company and why this job? You'll find it covers an astounding amount of what interviewers want to hear.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also be ready to answer "Tell me about yourself".
PPS - Because that's about the first thing you'll be asked.

Maturity

Sometimes I have an encounter with someone who is way more together and grown up than me. Someone with some real practical skills, used to being in charge. Bosses. Parents. It makes me wonder what kind of video games I need to play in order to gain that same maturity myself.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Is it Tetris? It's Tetris, isn't it?
PPS - I really do wonder about my maturity, though.

Know your assumptions

I like to say that it's important to recognise and state your assumptions up front, because that is the basis of logical thought. If you aren't assuming anything, you aren't speaking logically or rationally. If you don't know what you're assuming, you don't know where your reasoning might fall down. The problem, however, is that it is sometimes very difficult to see what you are assuming when you are making an argument. It's not based on assumptions you consciously place on the table, label "Exhibit A", and refer to as conditional. Your assumptions are quite often subconscious, and you won't necessarily know what they are before you use them.

That doesn't make it less important, just less likely that you will know your assumptions until you go looking for them. You have to question what you believe to be true. When you analyse your own thoughts, you will find yourself at some level saying "Well, of course that's true. Everyone knows that.". That's an assumption, but it might not be the very base level you could get to. Keep digging, and you'll be surprised just how much you've been taking for granted.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You will, however, assume you are correct in all your beliefs.
PPS - Despite knowing that, in general, you must be wrong about something.

SCiO

The SCiO pocket spectrometer is a pretty neat invention, working with your phone to determine the rough composition of everyday objects by light spectrum. The question is how soon such a device will be standard to embed into a phone. There's already a light sensor in your smartphone: the camera. If the camera can be tuned or upgraded to sense spectrometric data, you might already have everything you need to do the work of SCiO, with the right software.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not sure how viable that idea is.
PPS - SCiO probably has a relatively sophisticated sensor, more specialised than a camera.

Other people's expertise

When other people estimate the size and difficulty of your job, they will tend to lowball it, because of the Dunning-Kruger effect: when they don't know what you do, they think they're practically an expert. You'll find them saying things like "it shouldn't take long for you", "it's not that big a job", "there's not much to it" or "it can't be that hard". You won't be able to convince them otherwise without teaching them how to do your job, because as long as they can hallucinate that they know better than you, they will assume they have a high level of expertise in your job, regardless of what it is.

Could you write a book? Yeah, of course, you just hit all the keys on the keyboard in the right order and there's your worldwide best-seller. You've got the idea for it already, and all you have to do is write it, which is just mechanical. Could you be a model? Uh, wear clothes and walk? I think I can manage that. Could you be a rock star? All you need is to learn an instrument then roll around in the piles of money, right? Pfft. Simple. Read the news? They tell you what to say!

You get the idea. Just try to remember, before you guess that someone else's job is pretty easy, that you know practically nothing about it, and that destroys your brain's ability to make that judgement.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Estimating your own job tasks can be difficult for different reasons.
PPS - And that's a whole different issue.

The ethical treatment of artificial life

There have been many hypothetical experiments proposed on such topics as language, culture and isolated populations that would be at best impractical and at worst unethical to actually perform. Given the ability to fully simulate a human brain, however, along with a body and environment, would those experiments become viable? I imagine the computing power required would be staggering, and the setup work alone would probably be a lifetime's work. Where would you begin if you wanted to study the thought patterns of a whole village of people who natively speak constructed languages such as Klingon, Elvish or Lojban? There's always more than that influence in their lives, and every other influence is a variable.

But even if you could do it, would such experiments still be unethical? If you can simulate a whole human being, and you can copy her, branch her off into multiple timelines on a whim, merge her back together, move her between worlds at will and subject her to any kind of stimulus you so choose, whether pleasurable or painful, does she have the right to be treated with the same ethical restraint that applies to "real" humans? By the time we gain the technology to carry out these hypothetical experiments, we may prevent ourselves from doing so on the same ethical grounds that stopped us in the first place.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Science fiction keeps revisiting this idea, and with good reason.
PPS - I had problems enough with my Creatures and Sims.

Fair cake distribution

To ensure fair distribution of portions of cake (or whatever) between two people, there is a method called "cut and choose". One person cuts the cake, the other person chooses which of the two pieces goes to whom. It's a way of ensuring fairness without the need for a third party or authority figure. The problem is that it only applies to situations involving two people, and quite often there are three or more people involved. I've wondered for a while whether it is possible to extend the method to deal with an arbitrary number of people.

One way might be to have one person cut the first piece of cake, then someone else decides whether to take that piece or to have the cutter take it. Once you take your piece, you're out of the process (to enjoy your cake) and the other person in your cut-and-choose pair continues as cutter for the next piece. The problem is that it's really tricky, for instance, to judge a fair 1/7th of a cake by eye, so the first few cuts are likely to be very inaccurate. It's still as fair as you can get, though, because you either cut a fair piece or you lose. Cut too big and that much cake is gone from the game. Cut too small and you leave with less. The problem would be if 1/6th of the cake looked close enough to be fair, which has a carry-on effect to the rest of the cutting.
I'd love to give this experiment a try with real people, just to see if it works.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm sure "share some cake with me" will be a pretty easy sell for experimental subjects.
PPS - However, "please carefully follow this procedure before eating" might be more difficult.

Ownership

What would happen if a game got pulled from Steam? What if it was a really big and popular one? Someone would have to offer refunds, wouldn't they? I mean, you can't take millions of dollars from gamers, imply to them that they will have perpetual access to the game, then destroy it. That's just going to make you a lot of enemies. However, the first titles pulled from Steam would be older ones where the costs of ongoing support outweigh the revenues earned by selling it. Computer hardware advances all the time. Eventually, old titles won't be playable on new machines.

The question is: what does ownership mean in a world of walled gardens? If Steam goes out of business, for instance, what does it mean to "own" the PC games I bought there? What about if Amazon decides this whole Kindle thing isn't worth it any more and pulls the plug? If someone else can take it away so easily, then I don't really "own" what I've "bought" there, do I?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We really need other words for those actions.
PPS - I don't think "rent" or "license" sounds right, either.

Deciding and doing

Knowing what to do and doing it are much more fun than trying to find out what to do next. Decisions are hard. Action is easy, unless you've convinced yourself that you need to get motivated to take action.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Separating your deciding time from your action time is a big part of GTD.
PPS - At least the way I remember it. I need to re-read that book.

Black holes and antimatter

Could you annihilate a black hole by throwing enough antimatter into it, or would that just make it stronger? I guess it would recapture all the energy of the annihilation, but would it convert that energy back to mass by sheer pressure? Would that convert antimatter into normal matter? Clearly I need to brush up on my astrophysics.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or ask someone.
PPS - That's probably easier.

Neutral vs good

Most people are not bad people in the same way that most rocks are not bad rocks. It's kind of the default setting of sitting there, doing nothing. Being a truly good person takes more effort than avoiding the things you shouldn't do. That's neutral, not good.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And if you're always neutral, that's pretty bad.
PPS - It's hard to win that way.

Email inconvenience

When I happen to visit Yahoo Answers occasionally, looking for this or that answer to a technical problem, I notice that the site tells me how many new emails I have. "Oh," I think to myself, "That's convenient. I should check those messages while I'm here." I don't use my Yahoo mail account much, because it's basically my spam trap, but sometimes it attracts something useful. Anyway, I click on the icon and it asks me for my password to log in. "But," I say to myself, "how did you know how many emails I have if I'm not logged in?" At this point, I usually leave, because the convenience factor is gone.

As with all security, it's probable a trade-off with convenience. Yahoo knows who I am based on some old cookie or something, but needs my password before letting me see my mail. Understandable, but inconvenient.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wasn't a fan of the updates they made to Yahoo mail some time ago.
PPS - They took away all the keyboard shortcuts I'd been using.

I am being awesome at remembering names

When I started my acting classes at La Boite a few weeks ago, I told myself that, for once, I was going to be the one that was good with names. I was shocked to find that this worked, to a great extent. I didn't retain everything from the first week to the second, but I did remember about half the class, and picked up the other half again in week 2. By week 3, I know everyone's names.

We all tell ourselves and each other that we are terrible with names. I hear it often, from just about everyone. So being terrible with names is not some defect as such, unless it's a defect that every single one of us shares. What if we started speaking about it positively instead?

There was no trick or pattern to the way I retained names. As people went around the circle introducing themselves and answering some questions, I repeated the names in my head, mentally pointing to each person as I went. I went forwards and backwards around the circle while they spoke, paying more attention to my name memorisation than the personal stories. I tried skipping every second person so I wasn't just retaining a sequence, I associated names with facial characteristics or life stories if I could. I didn't have a great system, just repetition. The only thing I needed in week 2 for the names I forgot was a reintroduction. It's just another form of lines to learn, I say.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Now if only every time I met someone, we all stopped for 15 minutes so everyone could talk about themselves a bit.
PPS - I may require another strategy for everyday life.

Synchronised physiological entertainment responses

I heard recently (in Mur Lafferty's podcast "I Should Be Writing") of some people doing physiological response studies on movie audiences, finding that they breathe and blink all at once at certain times. Mur then speculated that the same kinds of things might happen for readers of novels, but that it would happen at their own pace, so it might be hard to do such a study.

You know what might work, though? If you're reading a novel on a tablet, there's a camera pointed right at you that could, in theory, do some eye-tracking and other measurements. If you were looking to do a very broad study of novel reading physiological responses at a low cost, I would look at that. Consent would be hard to get, though, and the data would vary quite wildly, I imagine. Still, it's a place to start, right?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That's assuming the data is worth trying to gather at all.
PPS - I can't imagine what it would be used for.

Big Data needs Big Analysis

Data processing is a big, messy prospect, for a lot of reasons. First and foremost, you don't necessarily know whether you can trust the data you're using, but even if you can, you still need to know what questions to ask and how to ask them, you need the right tools to process the data, and you need to know how to interpret the results. Very rarely is this a simple Q&A style interaction where you want to know what is the air speed of a laden swallow. For law enforcement, for instance, it's more like "has this person been anywhere suspicious, contacted anyone suspcious, or done anything suspicious recently?" Asking that question requires you to define "suspicious" a lot more carefully and specifically, and draw information from a lot of other sources, stitch them together and examine the results.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Learning to ask the right questions is half the point of education.
PPS - Figuring out how to find the answers is the other half.

Mutual location reminders

While my phone (via Google Now) can remind me to do something when I am at a certain place, it would be quite handy if it could remind me to do something when I am with a specific person. That would require shared location data, but it would, occasionally, be pretty handy.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then again, I can probably solve that problem with a text and getting out of the house.
PPS - Unless it's a chance meeting before I thought I'd get around to whatever the reminder was about.

The ways my phone is broken

I don't find apps or the network connection especially reliable on my phone. I also don't know if this is just the normal state of affairs these days, or if I have a particularly crappy phone. I don't want to complain. It's an excellent rectangle, but when it doesn't do the thing it's designed for, doesn't that make it broken? Some things that I'm fairly sure are due directly to the phone itself are network dropouts. Sometimes, out of nowhere, completely silently, my phone will lose its connection to the phone network, switch into "emergency calls only" mode, and be unable to receive calls or texts. It's like someone cut my brakes - I won't notice until later when I manually check, at random. This can be a bit troublesome. It has caused a few fights in our house where I didn't realise I was out of contact at a critical time. It also often drops the connection to wifi for reasons yet to be explained.

Navigation often stops mid-route, too. It goes silent, the screen goes black. This is troubling, because I use navigation to get to unfamiliar places. I can't pull over to fuss with my phone two or three times per trip.

If I switch applications too often in a short time, the phone will poop its pants then, too. Sometimes it can't install an update to an existing application, and that's the only explanation it gives: "the update could not be installed to the default location". Not "...because there's not enough space" or "...because the download was corrupted", just "nope".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - When the amazing things we own are broken, should we still be amazed by them and be grateful for them?
PPS - The update situation has gotten better since I uninstalled Facebook.

Little ideas

I have some little ideas that feel a bit too small to develop on their own. So here they are, basically unedited.

• Someone should make a backpack shaped like big AA batteries. I just think it would be cute and funny to see a hyperactive kid running around with a big battery pack on his back.
• I want to see a robot snooker tournament.
• I would definitely watch a steampunk noir detective show with a female protagonist. Somebody get on that.
• Someone should make a hat with handlebars for kids to hold while riding on an adult's shoulders.
• I'd like to see an acting-related reality contest show.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Feel free to point out anyone or anywhere these have happened.
PPS - Or go make them happen. Either way.

CAPTCHA solving motivation

At some point we are going to have a world where computers have become better at solving CAPTCHA images than humans are, on average. Because CAPTCHAs are used to keep spam bots and other malicious software out of places that have value to them, it is therefore a lucrative problem to solve. If you have the spam bot that can solve CAPTCHAs to get into discussion boards and website comment sections where others can't, then your spam bot has more value. Even tiny incremental advantages are big bucks to spammers, so they will keep fighting for every minute bit of progress they can make on this problem. Without entirely meaning to, we have incentivised the world's spammers to solve optical character recognition for us.

Perhaps what we need to do to solve the world's biggest AI problems is to start using them as gateways to spammers. Motivate the world's criminals to start solving things like image recognition, for example. "Which one of these is the elephant?" with four pictures to click on. Whatever difficult computer problems we have, we should use those as the standard CAPTCHA because, while they work, that's their advantage, but when they start to fail, we get better AI software.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's kind of a win-win, but in the form of an arms race.
PPS - And if you stop racing, the internet dies.

Proving trustworthiness

Computer security is a problem of trust, like all security. What if your users could earn a higher level of trust? For instance, if you send out a fake internal phishing email, anyone who doesn't respond gets a little more leniency in their network environment.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I ask this because I really want to be one of those trusted users.
PPS - Because network security restrictions really cramp my style.

Most of our information is disorganised

Does Google go far enough in actually organising our information? They have the world's largest, fastest, most comprehensive index of websites, and for some very simple questions they have "top-box" answers. There's also Wikipedia, which is a pretty good summary of the most significant items of human knowledge. Still, there are vast swaths of human knowledge that are too esoteric or difficult to be addressed these ways, and that feels like a wide gulf we can't yet cross.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Wolfram Alpha tries to be a factual answer engine. That's something.
PPS - Neither of them has answers for questions like "what might be wrong with my router?" though.

The fallacy of clean future technology

There are pictures of clean futures in promotional documentation, where all the technology seems to be built in, perfectly integrated and always works, on its own or with other technology. I have a feeling it's not going to be that way, no matter how long we wait or how much we want it. Humans will be the ones using that technology and humans are messy. We'll spill food on our kitchen computers. The wall nook for the screen in the hallway will be cut a little bit wrong and it won't ever fit properly. The entertainment system needs to be rebooted a couple of times before it will connect to the internet. The company that made the smart bathroom mirror are rivals of the ones who made the smart scales, so they use different protocols and won't work together. The fridge syncs to a different online service than the car, so the shopping notifications have to be copied across manually. That type of thing will happen to us all the time, and, as the consumers of such future technology, there is very little we will be able to do about it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Unless we build our own systems from scratch.
PPS - Or buy everything from the same vendor and hope they have everything we need.

Making faces

Sometimes I wonder if humans also have an innate tendency to design objects with faces in them. We find faces in the objects in our everyday lives because we all have this Pareidolia condition, but what if we also have a subconscious reverse Pareidolia where we want to put faces on the things we make? It would explain some objects quite well.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It is a pleasing visual arrangement, in either case.
PPS - So it would be no surprise to me if we naturally arrange things that way as well as looking for that arrangement.

History

The landscape of history is made, on the whole, not by great people doing great things, but by the accumulation of everyday actions by everyday people. That is the background on which the large-scale action takes place, and the context without which it makes no sense. It still contains great people doing great deeds, but there are far more ordinary people in the world than there will ever be heroes.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The leader of some great nation isn't anything without that nation behind him or her.
PPS - The exact same person in a lesser context, doing the same things, is less impressive.

The modern cyborg

The age of the cyborg is already here. The medical implants like pacemakers, artificial hearts and cochlear implants, as well as the constant advances in prosthetic limbs mean we are already making cyborgs. They may not be the "stronger, faster, better" Six-Million-Dollar-Man type, but you can hardly look at someone with a hearing aid literally plugged into a port in their head and tell me cyborgs are pure science fiction.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Perhaps we do need to worry about the ones that improve on humanity.
PPS - Or maybe they'll be unspeakably awesome. Who knows?

Movie/novel borderlines

If you were being kind of weird about it, you could try making a movie that was all text. Just frame after frame of words for the audience to read, like the Star Wars prefaces, but for the entire movie. At that point, would it still be considered a movie, or would it be more of a novel presented in video form?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also, ebooks could easily contain video, so you could do the opposite.
PPS - A bit like this, from CollegeHumor: The Kindle 3.

Eulalyzer irony

The Eulalyzer software, designed to scan click-through agreements on other software for potential red-flag terms, requires the user to read the very same kind of click-through agreement before installing it. I find this ironic, though I seem to be alone in this observation. I can't find anyone else causing any kind of fuss about Eulalyzer requiring an EULA click-through to install to do the job of avoiding reading EULAs from then on.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've never used Eulalyzer on itself.
PPS - In part because it needs to be installed first, and by then, who cares?

I'll be there if you need me

I'm just now getting around to reading all the articles from comedians and depressed people about Robin Williams' death, and one on Cracked said this about Chris Farley's final hours:

Back behind the wall, the real person was a scared, lonely, awkward fat kid who couldn't even pay someone to hold his hand when he died. "Don't leave me."

I stopped there for a minute and really looked at that sentence. I want to say now, to my friends and family, if you are ever that alone, any hour of the day or night, whether I'm working or sleeping or in another city, you can call me. I'll come and sit with you, or if I physically cannot get there, I'll talk with you as long as you want. I will, in all seriousness, drive across the city or fly to another state when you need someone. Just please believe me that you never have to be alone.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If I don't know you, there is someone else willing to do this for you.
PPS - Ask around.

You tell me

When you go ask a teacher or an expert a question and they just throw the question right back at you with "I don't know, you tell me", I find that to be the least helpful response they could give. I understand that it is meant to inspire further research, but it seems a pretty blunt and aggressive way to get the point across. The message I take away is "Don't come to me with questions, ever, because there won't be answers. Go get excited about learning on your own. Not my job." I didn't come here with an idea or opinion that I want validated. I'm curious and I have no ideas. I already ran out. That's why I came to you. So give me your opinion or, at the absolute least, ask me a different question that should guide my further research. If I wanted "you tell me", I could get that from a sign on my wall, and cut you out of the process entirely. I won't come back a second time if you do that, even to tell you what I learned.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's a blunt refusal to teach in response to a real request for knowledge.
PPS - To me, there isn't a surer way to shut down curiosity than by refusing to feed it this way.

Deserving

"I deserve" is a very dangerous concept. It rarely leads to anything good for everyone else. For instance, if you have made some noble effort of self-sacrifice, even if it served a need, does anyone owe you for that? No. Nobody asked you to do what you did, even if they benefited from it. Or if you've done one good deed, do you "deserve" a little selfishness? No, probably not. "I deserve this" is a phrase reserved for people paying themselves out of the goodwill they think they have built up.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This also applies to "I've earned this".
PPS - I try never to do this.

Mistakes I made while teaching karate

I taught karate for a year with the Australian Go-Kan-Ryu club, and I quit just before Christmas that year, which meant that I also missed out on the year's remuneration. I just couldn't stand it any more. I enjoyed having students, and especially those few that were outstanding, but I also found it very frustrating with some students and with the very young kids. It's hard to balance the high standards my teachers gave to me with the space to learn and grow.

What made me quit was the need to be available for every class every week. The one or two times I called in sick, it was a bit of a gamble whether a replacement teacher would show up at all. I also felt like my classes were rushed when I went at a normal pace, and then we'd end up trying to fill the last 30 minutes with games that never quite went the distance.

One particular mistake I made still bothers me. I had one student whose sparring was really coming along nicely. He was streets ahead of kids his own age and belt level, and it was inspiring to watch him. I got excited and I wanted to get in and have a go myself, so after the rest of the class was done sparring, I had them all sit down except him, I put on my gear and we sparred for a single two-minute round. He never came back.

What I was trying to do was get back involved in the direct teaching of advanced sparring, because most of the time I just had to watch and make sure it didn't get out of hand. With just the two of us, however, I could finally take part again. What I forgot is that, as a kid with a blue belt sparring an adult with a black belt, that was a terrifying situation I put him in with no explanation. I scared him off with what was meant to be a special learning opportunity. I should have taken a lot more time to explain beforehand what I was doing and why, and asking his permission in a more careful way. Instead of coming across as "HEY, YOU! LITTLE KID! LET'S FIGHT!" (which I didn't say, but is how he would have heard it) at that moment I needed to praise, support and ask permission. More like "I'm really happy to see how well you're sparring lately. If you want, I'd like the opportunity to let you practice with me now, one on one. If you don't want to, that's okay."

What I'm trying to say is: I'm sorry, kid. Just when you were starting to shine, I scared you away.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm fairly sure I bored away a lot of my other students.
PPS - Which is just as bad, but less direct.

My destroyed hard drives

I wrote a while ago that I had started using BTSync, a personal file sync program based on the BitTorrent protocol. While it seemed to work well, within a couple of months, all three of my hard drives in three different machines had failed, one after another. I can't be sure it was the fault of BTSync, so it might be unfair to say this, but I suspect BTSync was behind the unfortunate disk failures. For those three hard drives all to fail so completely and so close to each other seemed more than a coincidence. There had to be a common cause. When all the drives were replaced, I didn't reinstall BTSync.

Perhaps my collection of files was bigger than BTSync was designed for, and I overstressed the drives as a result. I'd hope that wouldn't matter, but for reference it was about 65GB of pictures, music and videos. I haven't found anyone else accusing BTSync of eating hard drives like this, so it might not be the cause. In any case, the hattrick hard drive failure scared me off.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I would try to figure out the real cause, but the drives are toast now.
PPS - I'm not sure what I could do with them to find out the truth.

Ideas man

"Ideas Man" should be considered a bit of an insult in our results-focused society. If all you produce is ideas but no implementations (uh, much as I have done with this blog...) then you should be asked to do something with practical value with your ideas.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If you regularly use your ideas, they call you creative, handy or practical.
PPS - "Visionary" is only a compliment if it's not all you are.

My questions about UltraViolet

Actual questions to ask about the UltraViolet digital streaming service that are not on any FAQ:

1. Since streaming of some titles is region-restricted, and the answer is "watch from a download copy", is it possible to download those copies while in a streaming-playback-restricted location?

2. What happens to my purchased titles when the UltraViolet servers are eventually switched off? Will I be notified in advance and be able to download my movies in a way I can keep using forever?

3. How long will it be before the UltraViolet terms and conditions are modified without notice in order to take away some of the rights that I have purchased?

4. If my children have been sharing an account with me, then grow up and move out of home, can they take their personal UltraViolet sub-library with them, without needing to create a new account and purchase everything all over again? When kids have sleepovers, can they all temporarily log in to their UltraViolet accounts so that they can all browse a big combined library instead of having to switch accounts to see what the others have to offer? When they get married, can their new spouse merge UltraViolet accounts with them? If they get divorced again, can they split their shared account and take part of the library each in the divorce proceedings? Can I inherit an UltraViolet account from a relative via their will? Can my siblings and I divide up the purchased rights among ourselves from that inherited account? Basically, can you split accounts and merge them, whether temporarily or permanently?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm assuming the answers are "no", "you're screwed", "when we feel like it" and "hell no".
PPS - I don't know anyone using UltraViolet.

Setting priorities

I don't think priorities of "low", "medium" and "high" are very helpful. You'll focus on the "high" priority tasks until it's pretty clear that the "low" and "medium" ones aren't getting done at all. More jobs will be classified as "high" priority just to make sure they get done, and a new "critical" category is usually added to differentiate the "high" priority jobs that need to come first. You can just keep climbing that ladder forever, if you want, until it starts looking ridiculous, with "hyper-critical" over "super-critical" and so on down in an ever-advancing "popcorn sizing" model.

If you want to actually set priorities, you need to compare pairs of tasks and say that one is more important than the other. Keep that up and you'll eventually get the top-level task that is more important than all the others. When that one is complete, you'll see the others below it and you can rank them relative to each other until you find the top priority among them. "Top priority" is an emergent property of knowing which tasks are more important than others. That's how you set priorities.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You may never get to those that get voted down to the bottom.
PPS - But you weren't getting to them anyway, so what's the difference?

Apocalyptic problem solving

Humans seem to need an apocalypse to fix a global problem. They never quite wipe us out, and we always change for the better afterwards. After the black plague, we figured out hygiene. After a world war, we figured out how not to nuke each other. That one's a work in progress. It is likely that we will solve our global warming and peak oil problems only after they become global catastrophes that almost succeed in wiping us out. A case can be made for that being our current position, but as long as the headlines can read "Global Warming Continues, Yet 7 Billion People Still Live", we as a species are unlikely to make significant progress. Perhaps global warming is too slow and gradual an apocalypse for us to respond to in our traditional "wait until it nearly wipes us out" way.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Maybe we can make it the personal problem of some powerful people.
PPS - Like spreading a rumour that global warming causes penis cancer in oil company executives, for instance. Which is totally true.

How to respond to a DDoS attack

If someone attacks your website with a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS), demanding money to make it stop, what's the best possible response? I suspect the best idea is to do absolutely nothing, or to reinforce and update your infrastructure. My reasoning is that the criminal has a particular business model and a limited set of resources at their disposal, large though those resources may be. Their plan is to bring down your website, get you to pay up, then move on to another target. If you make no response at all, what can they do? Your website is already offline. Their worst possible response is to keep it offline for longer, but that means they're devoting more of their resources for a longer time to a target that won't pay out. It becomes worthless to them. Before too long, it becomes far more worthwhile for them to devote those resources elsewhere, since they stand to actually profit from a different target.

Like spam, if everyone, worldwide, stopped responding to any of it, it would all completely dry up overnight, except for a few weirdos who get off on the power and don't care about the money.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - But, like spam, if it wasn't paying off, it wouldn't exist.
PPS - Crime doesn't pay, but it does scale well.

Logistical problems in the infinite hotel

There's a weird mathematical thought experiment to illustrate the properties of a countable infinity that goes as follows: you are the manager of an infinite hotel. That is, you have rooms numbered from 1, 2, 3 and so on, up and up, never ending, and right now, every room is full. When you get one more guest, even though every room is full, you can make room for them by moving everyone up one room and putting the new guest in room 1. The guest that was in room 1 goes to room 2, room 2's guest goes to room 3 and so on. Nobody has to leave and everyone still gets a room. This keeps working no matter how large a group arrives at once, as long as there's a finite number of them.

If an infinite number of guests arrives at once, you can still make room for them by advising every current guest to double their room number and move in there. The guest in room 1 goes to room 2, room 2 goes to room 4, room 3 to room 6 and so on. The new guests now check into the odd-numbered rooms and there's still enough space for everyone.

What I'd like to talk about, in a silly way, is the logistics of running a hotel like this. When these guests arrive, it's kind of a pain to move people. You could call up each room individually and ask them to move, but you'd never finish. You could just have the first guest relay the message to the next one, so room 1 tells room 2 to move to room 3, room 2 tells room 3 to move to room 4, and so on. Probably the best communication method is an infinite PA system so that you can address all the rooms at once.

The next part is what I always thought would get me down about staying in an infinite hotel. When that infinite group of new guests arrives, it's not so much trouble for the guest in room 1 to move next door to room 2, nor for room 2 to move to room 4. The guest in room 50 might be a bit miffed at having to move all the way up to room 100, but what about the poor saps up at room 1,000,000 and above? You'd probably still be on the move when the next call came over the PA to move up. So you start at room 1,000,000, and the manager calls out "infinite new guests, everyone please double your room number and move up there". You pack up your things and start walking from 1,000,000 to 2,000,000. Before you pass the door for room 1,005,000, the same call comes again, so now your new room is 4,000,000. It just gets further away all the time. Beyond a certain point, you're better off turning back to the check-in desk and announcing yourself as a new guest. In fact, that's probably where all these "new" guests keep coming from.

Lastly, every time you hire a new cleaner, you never see them again. They'd start cleaning at room 1, move on to room 2, then room 3 and so on down the line, never finishing until they just quit. Realistically, you probably need your guests to clean up after themselves.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Past a certain point, though, it would be impossible to verify.
PPS - Plus, on average, you'd probably spend all your time travelling to evict guests whose credit cards were declined.

Mismatched cutlery

I like mismatched cutlery. It means every fork has a story. When they all match, the story is "we bought these in a set". It's as if you have no personality in your home. It's just a pre-packaged, shrink-wrapped picture of what you think a home should be. When a home (or anything) is real, it has stories, scars and scratches.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I should incorporate it into a story someday.
PPS - I just have to figure out how.

Could a TV catch a virus?

Deb asked me the other day if it was possible her sister's TV had become infected by a virus of some kind, since it's been playing up very badly. They usually have to unplug it at the wall to "reboot" it a couple of times to get it to turn on, and the remote works maybe 50% of the time. My first thought was no, although the TV undoubtedly has a general-purpose computer inside, there's no viable infection vector. There's also no tangible benefit to anyone to write such a virus, even if they could get it into the TV. In all likelihood, the TV is just broken somehow.

However, there's one crazy possibility. Keeping in mind that I don't know quite enough about the protocols and systems involved, with their Playstation 3 connected to the internet, if they play a video over the HDMI connection and that video has some malicious code inside it somehow (maybe a buffer overrun) then there's a slight chance that such a video signal might infect the computer in the TV with a virus. The only thing it could really do from there is break the TV, though, which doesn't really benefit anyone ... except competing TV manufacturers. After all, if you buy a Toshiba TV and it breaks six months later, are you going to buy another Toshiba? You'll probably look to another manufacturer, and those guys are the ones who would write a TV-bricking virus targeting their competitors, in the hopes that you will buy from them instead. It's not a foolproof plan, but it has a slight chance of success. Sometimes that's enough.

With new TVs connecting straight to the internet, we may need to patch our TV operating systems regularly from now on, along with everything else in the house.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Although most manufacturers are unlikely to be that diligent in issuing patches.
PPS - And most devices won't be worthwhile targets for malware.

Obsolete version names

It bothers me when new versions of technology - typically wired or wireless network standards - get names like "long-term evolution" or "high-speed" because, inevitably, those standards end up being older and slower than whatever comes next, and confusing everything. Imagine trying to have this conversation in an electronics store:

"Which model is better?"
"Well, the old model only came with New High-Speed Future-Proof Best-Ever ports, but if you want to keep up, you should really go for the latest model."
"So what does the latest model come with?"
"They're called Version Next Lightning-Fast ports. Backwards compatible, of course."

It's just too much marketing-speak in the mix for average people to handle. That may be part of the goal - if you can still sell last year's model because it still sounds impressive, then you won't have to discount any stock, which is a win for you, but it really seems like a deceptive move.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Code names are slightly better, but version numbers are best.
PPS - You still can't compare version numbers between brands, though.

Declining cinema attendance might not be a problem

Is declining movie theatre attendance a problem to be solved? Well, first of all, Hollywood continues to report record profits every year, so they probably have nothing to worry about for the forseeable future.

Declining cinema attendance is either a sign of change in the entertainment industry or an opportunity. Either you go with it and, basically, bank on streaming services for home use, or you produce a better cinema-centric experience that people can't get elsewhere. Not just a bigger screen and louder speakers, and definitely not 3D. Something fundamentally new to go in that space so recently vacated by all those cinema audiences. Think about what people will gleefully pay for in a public space like that, not what they will grudgingly pay for because it's the only way.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The answer is also probably not "vaudeville" or "musical theatre".
PPS - If I knew the answer, I'd be on my way to doing it already.

Colonise other planets with bacteria

The more convinced we are that we just can't find the fascinating extraterrestrial life, and the more sure we are that our dirty, smelly, boring Earth bacteria will contaminate and destroy it, the less we will be able to explore in general. We already know we're not keeping even new, unknown species of bacteria out of NASA's clean rooms. What makes anyone think we haven't already contaminated Mars and the Moon? I say we give up on finding extraterrestrial bacteria for now, and instead try to spread Earth bacteria to places like Mars and the Moon.

And maybe discovering some form of Earth bacteria that can survive or thrive on other planets would be a really useful discovery. Maybe that would be the first step to terraforming those places.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or maybe we doom a bunch of bacteria to a slow, cold death.
PPS - Which is, frankly, better than doing so to people.

Programming and tools

Someone asked on Slashdot some time ago whether using an integrated development environment ("IDE") makes you a bad programmer. I think it's equally valid to ask the counter-question: does it make you a good programmer to refuse to use an IDE? In the end, probably not. Since this is a question about tools, let's pose it a different way: does it make you a bad carpenter if you use a nail gun? Does it make you a better carpenter to use a traditional hammer? Looking at it that way, without even getting into the concepts of programming at all, then answer should be a very obvious "What? No, of course not."

The other side of the question is: what defines a good programmer? Is it one who can use power tools to produce something very large with a fraction of the effort of an old-fashioned manual labourer, or is it the craftsman's skillset that lets him produce the perfect, elegant solution? It's probably a combination of both.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or else there's room and a need for both kinds.
PPS - I'd probably rather have the craftsman's skill, with the power tools option.

Peeling mandarins

There's a method of peeling mandarins where you remove the top and bottom of the peel, then just "unroll" the rest into a long chain of separated segments. It looks neat, but I think that's about where the advantages end. For me, the problem with peeling a mandarin isn't the presentation of the finished product, it's the juice. If you have a mandarin that's just a bit soft, you're going to end up dripping some juice around, regardless of how you peel it. I've tried this "caterpillar" unrolling method, and it doesn't seem to result in any less juice. I still have to dig my fingers in and put pressure on the segments to separate them in that configuration, so they still get slightly squashed and release juice. I'll probably continue to do it this way, but if I hear of another way that promises to reduce the juice, I'll try that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If you tell me some method is called "flaying" a mandarin, I might pick it based on name alone.
PPS - But then I'd feel self-conscious saying it to anyone.

Complexity in software development

I see a lot of programmers online these days complaining about their craft these days. I think some of them are getting close to the heart of the matter. For me, the problems in programming usually come from third-party dependencies. That's it. We have complex tools to manage them, because we need to, and we have lots of options for this or that functionality because it's difficult to figure out how to work with some libraries, or it just feels easier to write your own. Depending on one third-party library might not be so bad. Depending on several, especially when they all depend on different versions of some other fundamental library, is where it gets tricky.

Soon, rather than hearing about Agile software development methodology and tiered architecture, we may start hearing about designing software specifically so that it is easier to work with third-party dependencies. Maybe each layer will be split in two, with a dependency module to hold all the third-party tools it needs, and a nicely-engineered facade for the rest of the program to use. That's just a thought. The main point is that, for me, the complexity and frustration of software always seems to arise from third-party libraries and frameworks. While they give us power, they add integration complexity.

I work mostly in .NET, where apps can be nicely architected into layers and complexity hidden, if needed. I imagine this problem is much, much worse in everyone's favourite "modern" development environment: unstructured HTML+JavaScript. In that environment, you can't even tell if your third-party dependencies will still be there when you run the code, let alone whether they will destroy each other by trying to define the same things. Attempting a big, modern development project with JavaScript would be the opening of a horror movie, for me. JavaScript does not want you to succeed.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Yet people do it.
PPS - Somehow.

Jobs of the future

I wonder what jobs of today will make future generations look back and wonder what the hell kind of caveman lifestyle we used to lead. I mean, probably 90% of us these days are either telling machines how to serve their human masters or hammering them back into shape when they break. Boil it right down and, since the industrial revolution, a heck of a lot of jobs can be summarised just that way. You're either a Machine Operator or a Machine Repairer. Or a CEO who pays a secretary to read his email aloud.

So what jobs of today might technology make obsolete tomorrow? Taxi driver? Bartender? What jobs might the future hold that we had no idea we needed? One thing I really hope becomes a thing is "robot car herder". When our roads are full of self-driving cars, some of them are going to break down either in places or ways where they can't drive themselves back to the repair shop. A tow truck would handle those. The robot car herder would be tasked with tackling those cars that go out of control in their software, driving out into the desert, circling the same roundabout for days on end or that just got hacked to drive through the city until their GPS log trail spells out "BUTTS".

I picture the robot car herder riding back into town, standing atop a herd of rescued cars, his cowboy hat silhouetted against the sun on the horizon. Godspeed, noble car herder. Godspeed.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Thank you, Mr Car Herder, you've saved our village!
PPS - Okay, I'm getting carried away now. I'll stop.

Ice challenge vs troll status traps

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

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

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

The retrofuturism of Hyperland

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

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

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Interview performance

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Software project estimation will always be hard

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

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

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

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Pros and cons of cloud desktops for business

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Pre-funding TV show rescues from cancellation

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Urban camouflage

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Blu-Ray doesn't work for me

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

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Unique language sarcasm tones

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Facebook Save proves Facebook doesn't like to share

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

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

A hard lesson in supply and demand

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

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

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Cloud doesn't mean much

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

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

The stickiness of choice

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

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Cooking at the office

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

What I think of what I make doesn't matter

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Desktop kitchen appliances for work?

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Pride in your work is not quality

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Guessing jelly beans in a jar by volume

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Class of 1979

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

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

Singers:

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

Actors:

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Writing Letters to my Lost Children

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

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Outward-focused self-esteem

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

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

The most expensive TV to produce

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Working hours

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

When wifi is slower than mobile data

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

What should in-car computers do?

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

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

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

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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

Source control to manage third-party database changes

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

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

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

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

Mokalus of Borg

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