1. 04 January 2007

    Machine Beauty

    David Gelernter

    642 days ago

    I thought this was going to be more of a look at HCI, but instead it’s beating the drum for beauty and technology. Preaching to the choir a bit, as I’ve already decided the issue for myself. Being written in 1998 dates it a bit, but an interesting read nonetheless.

    Complexity makes programs hard to build and potentially hard to use; beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. 22

    “to hell with mathematics; let’s teach our programmers about beauty” is what we ought to hear. 27

    The mark of a well-designed interface is that, as soon as you see it, you immediately form guesses about how it works, and the guesses turn out basically to be right. 88

    Lifestreams as diary (111) – I think this is really what I’m going with this here website. It’s sort of a slice of what I’m about right now. I’ve cut down ‘past’ by only putting one article on the main page and making it a bit of a pain to go back through old stuff. But just a quick portrait of myself through the things I’ve said/linked/listened/done lately.

    Great technology is beautiful technology. If we care about technology excellence, we are foolish not to train our young scientists and engineers in aesthetics, elegance, and beauty. The idea of such a thing happening is so far-fetched it’s funny – but yes, good technology is terribly important to our modern economy and living standards and comfort levels, the “software crisis” is real, we only get from our fancy computers a tiny fraction of the value they are capable of delivering: we are a nation of Ferrari drivers tooling around with kinked fuel lines at fifteen miles per hour. 129

  2. 27 August 2006

    772 days ago

    Sandwich

    Get it?

    via Kjell Olsen772 days ago

  3. 04 April 2006

    917 days ago

    Mother Earth Mother Board

    Delightful Neal Stephenson article on the laying of undersea cable, written about 10 years ago.

    In 1870, a new cable was laid between England and France, and Napoleon III used it to send a congratulatory message to Queen Victoria. Hours later, a French fisherman hauled the cable up into his boat, identified it as either the tail of a sea monster or a new species of gold-bearing seaweed, and cut off a chunk to take home.

    The rule of thumb for calculating revenue loss works like this: for every penny per minute that the long distance market will bear on a particular route, the loss of revenue, should FLAG be severed on that route, is about $3,000 a minute. So if calls on that route are a dime a minute, the damage is $30,000 a minute, and if calls are a dollar a minute, the damage is almost a third of a million dollars for every minute the cable is down. Upcoming advances in fiber bandwidth may push this figure, for some cables, past the million-dollar-a-minute mark.

    It’s when a society plunders its ability to look over the horizon and into the future in order to get short-term gain – sometimes illusory gain – that it begins a long slide nearly impossible to reverse.
    The collapse of the lighthouse must have been astonishing, like watching the World Trade Center fall over. But it took only a few seconds, and if you were looking the other way when it happened, you might have missed it entirely – you’d see nothing but blue breakers rolling in from the Mediterranean, hiding a field of ruins, quickly forgotten.

    They [Alexander Graham Bell, et al] electrified the reeds in such a way that they generated not only acoustical vibrations but corresponding electrical ones. They sought to combine the electrical vibrations of all these reeds into one complicated waveform and feed it into one end of a cable. At the far end of the cable, they would feed the signal into an identical set of reeds. Each reed would vibrate in sympathy only with its counterpart on the other end of the wire, and by recording the pattern of vibrations exhibited by that reed, one could extract a Morse code message independent of the other messages being transmitted on the other reeds. For the price of one wire, you could send many simultaneous coded messages and have them all sort themselves out on the other end.

    The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.

    Kjell Olsen917 days ago

  4. 02 April 2006

    919 days ago

    Prisoner of Redmond

    During one of those last long nights working to deliver DOS 2.0 in early 1983, I am told that Paul Allen heard Gates and Ballmer discussing his health and talking about how to get his Microsoft shares back if Allen were to die.

    I’d sure feel good about buying my computer software from those guys. The combination of Allen having distanced his financial well being from his MS stock and an Iowa anti trust suit being heard this year lead Cringely to believe:

    Based purely on character (or lack of it), I confidently predict that Microsoft is going down. It should be interesting.

    via Kjell Olsen919 days ago

  5. 13 January 2006

    What the Doormouse Said

    998 days ago

    The charter tale of how military research with computing machines collided with the 60’s counterculture movements (anti-war, anti-establishment, psychedelics) in southern california and wove the fabric from which todays enormously popular personal computing industry grew.

    A real good read, pulling a whole lot of stuff into more or less one coherent thread.

    Summary

    Quick note: This is a very general recollection of the book I wanted to put down before forgetting everything. I wrote if after reading the last page, and might have a name wrong somewhere. If you find any glaring errors, leave a comment.

    It starts in the late forties with the establishment of two research institutes by Stanford, SAIL (Stanford AI Labs) and SRI (Stanford Research Institute). Computing is done within glass rooms, with colossal mainframes and time-sharing terminals.

    Doug Engelbart comes up with the grandiose vision of augmenting human abilities instead of replacing them with artificial intelligence, which over a period of twenty years grows into NLS, an ultimately failed computer system which rivaled in scope that of today’s internet. NLS failed due to its extreme complexity, but did advanced word processing, email, remote access, hypertext, and was generally way before its time.

    Englebart had been influenced by such subversives as Ken Kesey (and his merry pranksters), LSD, and other recreational drugs. He headed his own lab within SRI (ARC), which was funded by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), but regarded by the other groups at SRI as a bunch of hippies.

    As ARC grew it fragmented, and Englebart failed in keeping the lab together and moving it further toward his goals of augmentation for each and every individual. Many of his engineers moved onto the next big deal in what was to become Silicon Valley, Xerox PARC.

    PARC was split into two groups, one still focusing on the development of a timesharing system, and one developing the personal computer as Englebart saw it. Headed by Alan Kay, PARC pioneered computing as we know it today, although their computers were much too expensive to be commercially viable.

    Kay’s group negotiated an agreement with ARC (Englebart’s lab) to further the development of NLS, which never came to fruition. Englebart was a staunch proponent of complexity, he once decided that his finished system would have 55,000 commands to be learned by the layman. Ultimately PARC moved toward simplicity, coming up with a GUI for a word processing application that took no more then an hour to master, and ran on a machine with it’s own display, keyboard, and mouse.

    The west coast attitude of PARC ultimately clashed with that of Xerox, an east coast corporation. Although PARC pioneered the computers that ten years later finally became cheap enough to sell to the people, the focus of the personal computer revolution moved to individuals building their own machines as independents.

    They were never much, and couldn’t compare to the prohibitively expensive and powerful machines with large corporate/military backers, but they finally brought the computer into a situation where it was infinitely valuable.

    The people’s computer company was a storefront in which people could cheaply rent computing time by the hour. Text based games began to catch on. A subset of the BASIC programming language was conceived, Tiny BASIC, to run on the puny PC’s that were obtained.

    Tiny started it’s own movement, and the PCC started a magazine to send out to it’s developers. Text based games were becoming all the rage, and visionaries started teaching how to program text based adventure games to all comers.

    The Homebrew Computer Club was started, which ultimately sparked companies like Apple and Osborne to go into business. Fred Moore, an itinerant engineer, programmer, and radical who, because he though money was the root of all evil, ended up being given $15,000 by Stewart Brand at an epic Demise Party for the Whole Earth Catalog, had finally found something to do with the money: promoting free and easy access to information. Personal computing. Moore tried to start teaching a class on Hardware for PCC, but it wouldn’t happen. He ran sent out a notice as to when and where the first meeting would be held, and people turned up.

    The meetings grew, fostering open discussion and presentation of information about computers. People would bring the machines they’d built to show off. Programs would be exchanged.

    Moore eventually left the club, his idea of freeing information having been realized but also having sprouted all kinds of entrepreneurial enterprises, eventually coalescing into the single largest accumulation of dollars – the personal computer revolution. How ironic.

    Stuff for me to further investigate

    Stewart Brand (The Whole Earth Catalog, 155)

    Information wants to be free, and information also wants to be very expensive. Stewart Brand

    Ren���?⬨�� Daumal 177

    Fred Moore (on money, 193-8)

    Ivan Illich

  6. 29 October 2005

    1074 days ago

    ongoing • New Mac

    ...as soon as there’s some x64-based meat-grinder running Solaris that turns on instantly after sleep and and anti-aliases well and Just Works with whatever wifi, and doesn’t make me download drivers to do basic stuff, I may be outta here.

    When pigs fly, Mr. Bray.

    via Kjell Olsen1074 days ago

  7. 27 October 2005

    1076 days ago

    Government Keystroke Loggers in Laptop Computers!

    This is stepping a bit over the line. Where have all the civil liberties gone? hoax!

    Computer manufacturers appear to be cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security to make every person who buys a new computer subject to immediate, unrestricted government recording of everything they do on those computers!

    via Kjell Olsen1076 days ago

  8. 21 September 2005

    1112 days ago

    InTheBeginningWasTheCommandLine - spack.org/wiki

    So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we’ve evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands.

    Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.

    It is quite inconceivable that superior hacking tools could have been created from a blank sheet of paper by product engineers. Even if they are the brightest engineers in the world they are simply outnumbered.

    The ideal OS for me would be one that had a well-designed GUI that was easy to set up and use, but that included terminal windows where I could revert to the command line interface, and run GNU software, when it made sense. A few years ago, Be Inc. invented exactly that OS. It is called the BeOS.

    via Kjell Olsen1112 days ago

  9. 14 September 2005

    1119 days ago

    Wired News: Stars Rise at Startup Summer Camp

    Wired writeup on the results of Y Combinator summer founder program.

    via Kjell Olsen1119 days ago

  10. 01 September 2005

    1132 days ago

    New algorithm for learning languages | Science Blog

    For example, the sentences I would like to book a first-class flight to Chicago, I want to book a first-class flight to Boston and Book a first-class flight for me, please may give rise to the pattern book a first-class flight—if this candidate pattern passes the novel statistical significance test that is the core of the algorithm.

    via Kjell Olsen1132 days ago

  11. 28 March 2005

    1289 days ago

    DNA Key to Decoding Human Factor (washingtonpost.com)

    “Most of the time this happens the password is some quirky word related to the suspect’s area of interests or hobbies,” Hansen said.
    Hansen recalled one case several years ago in which police in the United Kingdom used AccessData’s technology to crack the encryption key of a suspect who frequently worked with horses. Using custom lists of words associated with all things equine, investigators quickly zeroed in on his password, which Hansen says was some obscure word used to describe one component of a stirrup. ??2??

    Relying on a word-list approach to crack keys becomes far more complex when dealing with suspects who communicate using a mix of languages and alphabets. In Operation Firewall, for example, several of the suspects routinely communicated online in English, Russian and Ukrainian, as well as a mishmash of the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets. ??3??

    ...”steganography,” which involves hiding information by embedding messages inside other, seemingly innocuous messages, music files or images. ??3??

    via Kjell Olsen1289 days ago

  12. 20 January 2005

    1356 days ago

    ~/doc/tricks.vim.html

    I’m trying to learn vim a little so I can use ssh to edit files quickly, but there is a lot to learn – and not that many good tutorials.

    via Kjell Olsen1356 days ago

  13. 1356 days ago

    Let no fellow nofollow, lest we all lie fallow from Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent

    I don’t know what all the fuss over googles new rel="nofollow" has been, but Ben Hammeresly does a good job at bunking it:

    There’s no incentive for me to spam those sites for the sake of getting Pagerank, that is true, but there’s even less incentive for me not*to. Why would I bother even testing the site for rel=”nofollow”? I might as well just hit it and leave. It’s less work for me, for exactly the same gain (some) and exactly the same loss (none).

    All it does is shift the problem from the high pagerank blogs we here might have, with rel=”nofollow”, custom sanitize settings, and mt-blacklist in full effect, all the way over to the less technically adept. And that is one enormous customer service problem heading towards Blogger, 6A and the rest.

    Technorati will have to choose if it’s a site that measures raw interconnectivity, or some curious High School metric of look-at-that-person-but-don’t-pay-her-any-attention that the selective use of the rel=”nofollow” attribute will produce. For many purposes, this would mean the results are totally debased and close to useless.

    The web has always been build on links – and yes, when it was build there wasn’t this marauding problem of comment spam, referrer spam, and really, there wasn’t spam at all – but I don’t think that the solution to spam is to fundamentally corrupt what has become the primary presence of the web – the interconnection and relation between various nodes in the larger network.

    via Kjell Olsen1356 days ago

  14. Also somewhat recently

      |