True Story

Until Facebook, I never realized how annoying something as mundane as my birthday could be. Thank you social networking overlords.

R.I.P: Finder/Explorer AKA "the Desktop", 1984-2007

I'm calling it - time of death: June 2007. Its been a long time coming, but it seems clear that the Blackberry, the iPhone, Outlook, Picasa, and iTunes all herald the end of document-centric computing.

The iPhone really didn't create this trend, but I'll say that its certainly a very visible final nail, just as the Macintosh Finder was the "visible" start back in 1984. Today, you don't keep piles of stuff on your "desktop" and activate applications (or applets) against relevant document parts: the vast majority your content is organized against your applications, not the other way around - the iPhone is a computer that doesn't even have a desktop, in any traditional sense.

There was a brief resurgence of the idea that the document was the gateway to your applications in the early 90's with OpenDoc and OLE (Object Linking and Embedding).

Hah.

We're at the starting tip of an orgasmic diarrhea of content creation in the form of e-mail, blog posts, music, photos and videos. And every single one of those is organized against single media form computing - barely a compound document in sight... you go to custom applications to create, edit, organize, and consume all the vast amount of gigabytes and terabytes of data we all share.

Vista Search and Spotlight in OS X only demonstrate even further how increasingly irrelevant the Finder and Windows Explorer are for everyday users.

In a slightly related tangent: What's most shocking to me today is how right Unix got it in the 1970's. URL's and hierarchical file paths seemed like dinosaur concepts in the early 90's before roaring back.

Either that, or we just haven't had the imagination to organize our way out of a paper bag since 1977... there's a parallel here.

Another way of saying "cool idea - wrong problem".

Fun with Flash

Amusing video :)

My new favorite word

w00t?

Not so much.... I like "backronym...." :)

(ok, maybe *favorite* is a strong word - but its funny... looks funny, sounds funny, is funny - try saying it aloud)

Facebook, baby

(First: Sorry for the post dearth - its August, what can I say?)

It started a bit slowly, but since Facebook opened up its doors to all comers, its become quite the deluge from my social circles (way behind on friend approvals still) - it took LinkedIn many years to achieve any critical mass for me.

Zero to hero very quickly... obviously curiosity and, quite frankly, a well thought out product with a positive developer eco-system have been rewarded (remember this idea?). In fact, no coincidence, I think, that developer APIs coincide with Facebook's recent rapid rise beyond the college crowd... this is how you go from narrow to general: by letting your application become a platform.

That is, you succeed best by letting others success feed you.

So, I'd been meaning to blog about this upswing for a few weeks now... and then I ran into this today:
Ick, old married guys on Facebook

It speaks for itself: Perspective is everything :)

The Future's A. Kay

In discussing past lives with a new colleague, I found that he worked (back in the day) at Atari, with, of all folks, Alan Kay (who knew Alan was at Atari?!?).

In any case, it reminded me of one of my all-time favorite quotes, uttered by the aformentioned Mr. Kay:

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

There's a boldness there that rarely fails to get my blood pumping.

But its occurred to me: Alan's expression is also a rather clever, oh-so-polite and positive (if slightly passive aggressive) way for a technologist to say: "When I want your opinion, I'll give it you" (think about it) - no wonder I like it so much :)

How about you guys in the peanut gallery? Any favorite sayings that spin on multiple axes of rotation?

Review: Pure Digital DV Camera - Nice Product

I was talking to John McKinley the other day - he of "I'm leaving, and I'll tell you about it on Valleywag" fame (sorry John, couldn't resist :P)... but I digress... I was talking to John, and he recommended a product he'd been using recently - which I purchased and had sent to me two day overnight from Amazon.

John was the one who first turned me onto Flickr, Skype, and LinkedIn (waaaay back when), so his track record for "cool tech/products" is pretty good, with me, at least.

And I have to say, he's right again... John's been using the Pure Digital PSV Flash RAM DV camera, which looks (and feels) a little like a piece of junk you'd buy at the checkout counter at Rite Aid.

But its not.

First of all, its hyper easy to setup and use: it has all of four buttons, and you're literally recording video within two clicks of opening the box (hit "power", hit "record" - it comes preloaded with the two AA batteries it requires to function). It has a built in USB port/jack for connecting to your computer, and stores a full hour of MPEG-2 (I think) video. You can also connect it right to your TV for display with included cables.

It records at VGA resolution, and I have to admit that although the quality isn't QUITE good enough to replace my 3CCD mini-DV Panasonic just yet, I'll still be using it quite a bit. It also does a fabulous job adjusting to all manner of lighting conditions automagically - its a category defining product in my opinion; its really that polished.

The aesthetics of device and software could really use some work (for example, I've often stopping my recording when trying to zoom-in/out because of poor button placement), but the thing is small, light, durable, completely portable, entirely self contained and easy to use. It even includes software to immediately upload, e-mail, or copy your videos on your PC right on the flash RAM on the device, so when you plug-it into your computer, it just works - nothing else you really need.

I'm not sure if Pure Digital's specific implementation will carry the day, but its a good execution.

Go buy it. It's even cheap(ish)!

Reading online

I've been trying to do more long form reading online, and it kind of sucks. Anything more than a page, and it get annoying. I've tried online books, PDFs, technical specs, long form comics, and its just not comfortable.

Short stuff is fine - though even long magazine articles are taxing...

I don't think its a tech issue, per se (resolution, rendering, or the like) - I think its a device form factor thing. One of the things I always really like about the swivel/arm generation of iMac was that it entered your plane... it wasn't distant in the way most monitor configurations are.

Its also very possible that its simply an age/comfort thing - enough effort and I'll get used it. Nevertheless, I think it contributes to the cycle of ever shortening attention spans.

On the flipside, it encouraged me to get a wireless printer, which I love and use regularly to read anything more than a few pages. I think somebody will get this right at some point - PDAs/phones are too small, and computers (even laptops) are too far and too ... not right.

MLK, Jr. Reflections: Name that Source

Monday was the official US holiday in remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his contributions to the Civil Rights movement.

So in honour of that, I'd thought I'd share three quotes from, let's say, karmically connected sources - I'm not going to provide attribution. Its easy enough to find out on any search engine, but before you look it up - think about who you THINK said it; you might be surprised (OK, *I* was surprised - you might not be...)

Quote 1: "Hate the sin, not the sinner"
Why this was interesting: I've heard this forever and always, and had always assumed that it was a theologically derived philosopohy. Not so much - turns out it has a very secular origin, and the source provided much of MLK's inspiration. And I really should have known this one.

Quote 2: "Good fences make good neighbors"
Why this was interesting: Like "chuffed" or "droll" (or "absence makes the heart grow fonder..."), this phrase is often used in support of the thing that was intended as its antithesis. By that I mean, the originator meant that fences make boundaries, not neighbors, but its taken literally quite often, which is quite ironic. I think Dr. King would have agreed with the original sentiment - being a "together" guy and all.

Quote 3: "If we don't stand for something, we may fall for anything."
Why this was interesting: Its kinda of a "philosophical" gimme.... you know, like you said something important, but you didn't really say anything at all. Still makes you feel good saying it!

Bill Gates and my bathroom

Update 1: I've been informed (by my wife) that, um, shoving a whole chicken in the garbage disposal is NOT a good idea. Go figure.

Update 2: Bwa-ha-ha - my diabolical plan (humour-by- association) appears to be working (You're welcome Carl!). We now return you to your (ir)regularly scheduled post.

What the heck do they make garbage disposals from? Those things are nigh indestructible. I shoved pretty much a whole (leftover) chicken down my sink last night, along with various other food-ish substances, and that thing just kept chugging along.

And that was just last night. I wonder if that's what all the people who used to make samurai swords are doing now...

And speaking of funny (see what I did just there?), if you're not reading Scott Adams' blog, you should. Much has been made of Bill Gates' prognistications in SciAm last month, about robots and home automation, but I thoroughly enjoyed Scott's take. He puts pretty much the same concepts into more, um, relatable territory: the bathroom.

Scott Adams, of course, is the author of Dilbert, but his blog (and especially his book, the Religion War) are to Dilbert as Office Space is to Beavis and Butthead - all they share is the author (Mike Judge in the latter case) and a skewed world view. I enjoy all four, but in very different ways.

Plus, I'm just hoping you'll think *I'm* funnier when you read Scott's blog; humour-by-association, or something.

And (ironically for this post), Scott Adams is also a (serious) proponent of the Bill-Gates-for-President movement. Its a strangely compelling argument: "For my president I want a mixture of Mother Teresa, Carl Sagan, Warren Buffet, and Darth Vader."

Indeed.

Just keep him away from my toilet...

How to make software faster (with hardware)

I also read over the holidays some nice posts from a Photoshop architect (and engineer) about performance in software with regards to both 64 bit computing and the broader proliferation of multi-core processors (with Photoshop specifically, in this case). I've said this many (many) times, but this is a good excuse to repeat it: the best way for hardware designers and vendors (*cough* Intel *cough*) to improve utility (and therefore value) of the CPU is to improve memory bandwidth from the CPU. Clock speeds and cores and more processors and fancier instructions will make micro-benchmarks perform better, but RAM access is what will provide BY FAR the most improvement for well optimized software (read: where algorithms trump assembly).

For example, the biggest advantage that NVidia and ATI, with their GPUs, provide isn't the specialized HW instructions for rendering graphics (though those help): its that they can access RAM, oh, about a 50x to 100x faster than it can be addressed by the CPU.

That said, it is clear that the dramatic increase in multi-core processors in computers (and units per CPU) will create a new class of software and algorithms to be advantaged by them. Nobody's arguing that their sh!# doesn't stink...

Keyboard Diarrhea

Funny, but in my head, all my posts are short. In real life, not so much.

Time-wise, its all about the same - the only posts that take more time than the average e-mail (or two, maybe) are the coding-type posts, which are few and far between. Verbosity has never been one of my personal challenges :)

Still, I'd rather be concise - "Brevity is the soul of wit", and all that. There's some positive reinforcement that you'd think would help me: my smaller articles and posts tend to generate more comments and discussion - seems to be less interest in my more wind-bag-y dissertations.

On balance, that's probably because (a) the smaller posts get read more - "economy of motion" in action, and (b) they get misunderstood more - that is, people read what they want into them, which always makes for good fun. Or it could be because (c) my "insights" are, well, a bore :)

And that's all I have to say about that.

Really :)

Almost.

(Except to mention that this post title is not SEO friendly :P)

Math is your friend

This made me smile:
*
Isn't that what friends do? :)
(of course, this made milk come out my nose... but to each his own :))

*from xkcd under CC license.

I must be getting older...

I'm more interested in the Wii than in the PS3 (neither of which I'm likely to get anytime soon...). It just looks like more fun (for everyone :))

(Note: The Wii clip below is a spoof - but be warned, its a little sexist/sexual)

Car Communication

Updated: Ask and ye shall receive (link courtesy of a commenter - thanks Chris!)

Its seems like the car horn has basically become an instrument of anger. I don't think you can honk it without seeming mad. Even a tap is a sign of impatience, not communication (think about whenever you're on the receiving end).

I guess CB radios were an attempt to create transient communities for commuters and the like - and cel phones have taken their place for fixed communities, but wierd to me that there's no good way to communicate with the folks around you when driving... maybe this will be one of the emergent expressions of location based services?

In of itself that's surprising - you'd think geography and technology would be a great(er) fit; look at the success of GPS. Like wireless computing, once you do it, you'd can't go back. So why is it so hard finding a behaviour pattern for location enabled computing that's more than a techno-fad?

Important factors (I think): ease of setup, discovery, of course, but more than that - what's the new behaviour eco-system this enables?