The bane and blessing of software: updates

Posted on August 2, 2010 by flyingflashlight

My quest to add even more luster to my shiny, very part-time blog ended in a small disaster after I updated to the latest version of WordPress.

This is yet another sad tale in the ongoing narrative of new vs. old in the realm of hardware and software: Before stepping up to the latest and greatest, weigh the benefits and cost of doing so.

Of course, I didn’t do that. I just wanted the new thing and I didn’t want to read even short summaries of what had changed. And that nag at the top of my dashboard was killing me, man, killing me.

Well. The adventure, then: I continually had a mystifying error that informed me of some kind of upload limit when I tried to automatically upgrade. Ah, sadness. Even my usual backup to WordPress’s baked-in automatic upgrader, the automatic upgrade plugin, failed. So I had to, yech, actually upload files using FTP. It is my wish no one else ever has to do this.

What I didn’t expect was a wiping out of many, many old uploaded files when I took this desperate action. I think I misunderstood the command I gave Transmit. I told it to replace old files, not wipe out ones in the folders already there … but evidently if you replace a folder, it will not retain any files within it, even if they have different file names from the new folder you are uploading.

End result: Goodbye to almost all of my photos, except those displayed via embed code.

Unless there is a must-have security update, I will not be updating my WordPress blog again.

Popularity: unranked [?]

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What will be absolutely terrible about virtual life: the absence of touch

Posted on July 30, 2010 by flyingflashlight

Japan has sent every virtual reality freak into spasms of anticipation with the idea to project a holographic version of the 2022 World Cup onto soccer fields around the globe.

Yes, we are talking Star Wars communication console version of World Cup 2022.

Give me a moment. Eyes are widening. Mind reeling in disbelief. Pondering life, reality, doom, navel, etc.

Okay, all good.

First, let’s clarify: The holographic version is going to happen if the technology exists by then. If it doesn’t, I don’t care. I never thought 3-d projections on screens were very exciting for anyone except movie execs thrilled to forcibly remove another $5 to $10 from my pocket. Everything looks a little rounder? The vines in Avatar are going to poke my eye out? Yippee.

But digital ghosts running around a field while I’m blowing my black market vuvuzela?

Well now, that is something to send one’s mind into a future full of everything except one crucial element: touch.

As amazing as it would be to see shimmering light creatures chasing after a glowball, this experience is always going to fall short until I can somehow get on that field and start slide tackling some fútbol fools. Same goes for any holographic projection of an event occurring far away. Oh, I’ll still shell out my entire 401k to watch this thing, but my inner reptilian brain will always be asking, No touch? No play play soccer?

A life without touch is a life inside a Matrix body tube. Of what purpose is the flesh if it does not feel?

It’s easy enough to think of all kinds of events and, um, activities being absorbed by this technology. And once they are, we will see a huge drop in the messy, risky, costly, resource-intensive, face-to-face interactions that have slowly been replaced by devices that eliminate the barriers created by distance.

As everyone (right?) knows, a chat over a beer with your best friend is a whole lot different than a phone call or even a Skype session. It’s not that you’re sitting there slapping each other in the face and saying, “Man, I feel you! Hit me harder!” It’s bigger than that. It’s about you taking the time, energy and money to get somewhere. It’s about being in a space that might be too loud, might be too hot. It’s about being uncomfortable, and reacting to that discomfort, and trying to manage it.

Real life is about everything not being in your control, and all of the freedom and terrifying implications of that. If you walk into a knife, it’s going to make you bleed.

Virtual reality is about everything being under your control. You can dance with helicopter blades and not feel a thing. No risk, no pain, no consequences.

Until I can pull off a Zidane on the virtual field, real life will suit me just fine. Electric ghosts will be good for watching. Nothing more.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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All the annoying devices up in my grill should be programmable computers like Stanford’s Frankencamera

Posted on July 23, 2010 by flyingflashlight

I want all the gizmos cluttering my life to work like Stanford University’s SLR camera.
This baby has been around for a while, but now the university is releasing the code behind it and picking up $1 million from the National Science Foundation to make free Frankencameras for computational photography professors.

OK, I should be more specific: The wild and free code will work with the Nokia N900, evidently a supa-dupa smartphone. Your 5D ain’t gonna be R2D2 any time soon. But we can hope, right? Maybe the necessity of omni-programmabilty will be, ahem, properly exposed with Stanford’s latest effort.

One trick of the Frankencamera I know that I would look forward to is bending light to my will. With Linux in your cambox, there’s no more choosing between a sharp, fast but dark exposure, or a blurry, but well-lit, one. See, a Frankencamera “shoots both exposure speeds in rapid succession and then automatically combines them, resulting in a photo that is both bright and sharp.”

So you’ve got software extending the abilities of a device. Nothing new, just check out the app store for the iPhone. Same story, different tool. But why stop there? I say, “Apps for everything!”

Give me customizable beeps on my microwave, let my washer show me my percentage of a city’s water usage, make my alarm clock add a few minutes to the time if I continually push snooze … you know, make these things better.

Is it that hard? Every gizmo has important similarities. It accepts input through various means (buttons, switches, keyboards, touchscreens and so on), it displays some kind of useful information (the time of day, your location on a map, the image you just captured and so on), and it does something (heats your food, washes your clothes, wakes you up, connects you to your e-mail, snaps a photo and so on). The biggest obstacle it seems is the display and input mechanism. If these were standardized across gizmos, then so too could apps. But what screen and input mechanism could possibly work on so many sizes and types of device? I don’t know. All I can think of are those hologram communicators in Star Wars.

Surely Google is working on this. Would you want a washing machine’s cost subsidized by ads streaming across its screen? Is Google going to pay for my house if the walls are screens full of a stream of ads? My apartment is feeling pretty small lately…

Anyway, back to the Frankencamera (Professor Marc Levoy’s name for it, not mine).

The SLR for all those cam-comp profs will be available within a year. It will gets its full introduction at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles starting July 25. The programmable-camera project began in 2006 with Nokia.

What else, what else. Ah, forget it. I’m tired. Chew on this: all da links in this post in a neat little pile:

Popularity: 4% [?]

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Highlights From Google Researcher’s Advice on Improving Online Social Networks by Understanding Real Ones

Posted on July 9, 2010 by flyingflashlight

Summary: Businesses and individuals who want to improve their online social activity will learn a lot from this presentation on the design flaws of online social networks, and how they could be addressed by providing communication options for the subtle and varied nature of people’s relationships with one another.

Who provided the presentation: Paul Adams, at thinkoutsidein.com, is a lead researcher for social at Google. He investigates how people use social media. He works on Buzz and YouTube. He wrote a book, Social Circles. It’s out in August.

Rumor mill: Mr. Adams’s observations could provide insight into how Google might approach its rumored competitor to Facebook, Google Me.

Get on with it: The slide show of the presentation is embedded below, and after it I’ve provided a list of 36 slides (out of 216), along with descriptions of them, that I found particularly interesting. I copied the language from the slides or slightly modified it for brevity.

The Real Life Social Network v2
View more documents from Paul Adams.

15
The problem is that the social networks we’re creating online don’t match the social networks we already have offline. This creates many problems, and a few opportunities.

Continue reading →

Popularity: 11% [?]

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Photo: The Sun Does Not Stop

Posted on July 1, 2010 by flyingflashlight

The Sun Does Not Stop

Popularity: 8% [?]

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The Failures of Borg Blogging: My Blog Connects to Buzz, Facebook and Twitter, but Promises Are Broken

Posted on June 30, 2010 by flyingflashlight

I’ve connected my Buzz to my Google Reader using Justin Korn’s instructions. My blog entries will now automatically be Google Buzzed and sent to my Google Reader shared items.

But the medium is the message, and creating one info entry for multiple Web platforms will always incorporate a bit of failure.

It’s efficient, but there’s no getting around the fact that, for example, a good Tweet is not a good blog entry.

But what makes a good Buzz? Well, Google’s service can accommodate just about anything with its “expand this post” option. It seemingly has no constraints. Great, right?

Maybe not.

Buzz’s flexibility is one reason why it failed to take off to the extent of Twitter.

No constraints on Buzz’s ability to incorporate content means Buzz has no constant and clear promise about what kind of information experience you are going to have when you interact with it.

On the Web, metadata about your content — clear indications of what it is about, how long it might take to consume it, what payoff there might be, why it matters — are just as important as the content itself. The Web is a grazing medium with an effectively infinite number of alternatives at all times for people browsing your content. If people want to leave, it’s very likely they will.

On Buzz you could get two words, or videos, or 500 words and a pic, or just a link, or whatever strikes a sharer’s fancy. It’s complicated. You don’t know how long a Buzz will take. Your time is vulnerable.

Compare that to Twitter’s promise: No more than 140 characters.

So simple. Even if the topical focus of the content varies, the information will remain digestible because of its limited length. Your time is protected.

Time is our most precious commodity. Attention, too. Services that enhance our ability to use them effectively will win the day, even at the cost of sacrificing flexibility of information experience.

What I’m doing by updating my entire network with one post of a style best accommodated by my blog is compromising the promise made by different Web services. I bring a cold business-like approach to Facebook and its strength in adding virtuality to real-world relationships; I avoid the clear brevity required by Twitter; with Buzz, I … well, Buzz has no promise.

Will this be worth it? Don’t know. But if you’re a company with money to spare, I suggest customizing your communication to each Web service.

Until I get those deep pockets, I’ll experiment with feeding my chain of interconnected sites (Twitter, Buzz, Facebook Fan Page, Google Shared Items) with this blog. I have a feeling it won’t last.

Popularity: 38% [?]

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