Thoughts on Flash

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business [...]]]> Why does Apple only stand up and say, “this is what we’re doing, and this is why” every year or two? When they do, it usually makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Thoughts on Flash

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

Since I do a lot of uploading photos into WordPress, it’s a [...]]]> I’m not sure if it was 10.6 or iLife ‘09 that introduced the Media Browser, but it’s pretty handy. In a nutshell, you can access your media directly from the API-standard file dialogs. It’s a lot easier to show than it is to explain:

Since I do a lot of uploading photos into WordPress, it’s a real time-saver: I don’t have to export to the Desktop or go hunting through the iPhoto directory structure trying to remember if the photo I want is in “Original” or “Modified”.

Unfortunately, it also seems to be pretty buggy as of now (10.6.2). It seems to stop writing application data to the browser interface pretty often, but without any rhyme or reason I could ascertain. There are plenty of people with similar issues. (The Media Browser displaying no content at all seems to be the most common.) Fortunately the solution is pretty simple; you only have to trash one prefs file, at /Library/Preferences/com.apple.iLifeMediaBrowser.plist. I may end up setting up a cron job so I don’t have to remember to do it every time.

I assume no liability in the event this causes your PC to become self-aware and turn on you.

Until recently, I had only used the word "revolting" in jest.

It really got me thinking about wearables. I remember the IBM commercial from probably a decade ago in which a [...]]]> I was lying in bed last night, too jacked up from a day of coding (OK, and a Tom Clancy novel) to get to sleep right away, and my half-zombified brain was thinking about this TEDTalk:

It really got me thinking about wearables. I remember the IBM commercial from probably a decade ago in which a guy sitting on a park bench is doing stock trades with this goofy monocle hooked up to some specious portable in his pocket. It seemed outlandishly futuristic at the time, but now it’s just anachronistic, because computers are so far beyond it, and yet that hasn’t happened yet. Besides, who wants to wear a piece of glass over their eye, not that painting your fingernails in primary colors is much better.

The problem with wearables (and modern incarnations like netbooks and iPhones) is that no matter how portable the device becomes, there’s a still a disconnect between physical and electronic objects. The internet is literally passing through us, but there’s no interaction. When you look at things like RFID, networked running shoes, and geotagging, it seems pretty clear that the next decade is going to be all about eroding that distinction. To be honest, I don’t see a true wearable being a valid solution in that timeframe. The hardware just isn’t available to allow even a modestly powerful computer to be worn as jewelry – let alone a battery that doesn’t suck, but that’s a different rant.

I think the real breakout product for this tech would be an iPhone with the projector and camera embedded in the screen. If you have an LCD and a backlight, the only thing missing is a lens. The hardware is actually already at least in the planning stages, and the software (OCR/facial recognition) is already running on cell phones. With a good SDK, the applications would take care of themselves (just look at the Apple App Store), but here’s one idea: you buy a good old-fashioned movie ticket, then hold it up to the screen of your iPhone. Thanks to WiFi/4G, it “recognizes” (really just a fast google search) that this is a movie ticket, then clones the RFID tag so that you can safely lose the paper ticket, updates your calendar, and sets the phone to vibrate during the movie.

I have an LCD.

There’s a lesson to be learned here.

I’ve been in Oak Ridge for almost two weeks now, long enough to have formed some impressions but not long enough to have them bitch-slapped out of my head by the cold, hard hand of reality.

Impression the First: When I visited New Orleans, I was inclined to [...]]]> Well, I think I’ve waxed sufficiently philosophic for now.

I’ve been in Oak Ridge for almost two weeks now, long enough to have formed some impressions but not long enough to have them bitch-slapped out of my head by the cold, hard hand of reality.

Impression the First: When I visited New Orleans, I was inclined to chalk the driving habits of people in the Big Easy up to the fact that it was Mardi Gras weekend and people were hot, impatient, drunk, tourists, or all of the above. During my drive to Tennessee, however, I noticed that the overall quality of driving began to drop not long after I crossed the Illinois-Kentucky border and dropped precipitously for the rest of the trip. Attention, all those who live south of the Mason-Dixon Line: learn how to drive. Now. Put the beer down, duct-tape a rearview mirror to your pickup, get the gun rack out of the rear window, and clearly label the accelerator and brake pedals so that you will no longer be confused. This will largely obviate the need for me to pass you, and the ensuing activation of whatever mechanism it is that allows you to accelerate at the expense of converting leaded gasoline, which you use because it is available at the local gas station for slightly less than that unleaded crap that’s basically just water anyway, directly into atmospheric hydrocarbons so that you can keep pace, leering at me with seventeen, plus or minus six, teeth. Just knock that shit the fuck off.

Impression the Second: East Tennessee is incredibly, shockingly beautiful. I have some serious hikes planned, and I’ll try to get some pictures. Driving more than twenty miles from Oak Ridge in any direction entails a vertical climb of at least a thousand feet. The route I’ve taken to running in the mornings takes me along the axis of the Tennessee Valley for about a mile, then up a cross street that climbs five hundred feet in about half a mile to Outer Road, which was the fenceline when the Army was running the show. Apparently if I kept going through the forest to the top of that ridge I would come across a trail that runs along the ridgeline for about thirteen miles and which I think is part of the Appalachian Trail, which I am advised it is not possible to hike in a weekend. I said forest, which brings me to

Impression the Third: “Forest” means very different things in different parts of the world. It can, for example, refer to a rain forest, which has comparatively little ground cover but a lot of action going on in the canopy. In eastern Arizona a forest is a place where the aspen grow so close together that they make walking a challenge. In the Missouri of my Boy Scout days a forest was an expansive, mostly flat region with a substrate of dead leaves and pine needles, inhabited mostly by old-growth trees: oaks, hickories, elms and the like. In East Tennessee (I use “East” in lieu of the more grammatically correct “Eastern” out of respect for those locals I’ve met who appreciate the beauty of this place), the forests take the form of shorter, more densely packed trees supported by a network of rhododendrons and various smaller plants. In mathematical terms, the forests of Missouri are anisotropic, and the forests of East Tennessee are isotropic – they do not tend in a single direction, i.e. upward. In this respect they have more in common with forests I associate with South America and Asia – they are, in other words, jungles.

Impression the Fourth: The fireflies of East Tennessee are some bizarre species that synchronizes its blinking. I first noticed this last Friday night, which is a decent segue into a pretty good story. Friday night I went to see a play (The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which was great) at the Oak Ridge Playhouse, which is now in its 62nd season and where I may have a part in the upcoming production of Bye Bye Birdie. At any rate, my mentor’s wife and daughter were part of the production and afterwards I was invited to a combination cast/graduation/birthday party for his daughter, at their house. I followed my mentor home, and by the time we arrived the party was in full swing, owing in no small part to the fact that we had stopped en route to pick up a keg at Wal-Mart (be still, my beating heart). To make a long story short, I wound up staying until about 4:30 AM, during which time my mentor’s son, Christian, and I twice had occasion to climb the hill opposite his house, discuss firefly synchronicity, forest isotropy, the works of Neal Stephenson, and marijuana, of which I did not partake, owing to sense of filial piety to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed by the University of Tennessee at Battelle for the Department of Energy.

Observations the Fifth and Higher, or, those related to ORNL: There are a number of inflationary effects that take place once you pass through the security checkpoint on Bethel Valley Road, which did not exist three years ago. Some of these are to be expected, such as the IQ inflation effect, the consequent ego inflation effect, and the guys-in-camo-fatigues-with-assault-rifles inflation effect. One that caught me by surprise is the display-size inflation effect. Apparently, with the taxpayers footing the bill, no display is too large. A 17″ LCD is the status quo for secretaries and engineers alike, with those who have been there longer or who have larger expense accounts being able to justify 19″ or even 21″ LCDs. My 21″ CRT marks me as an engineer at the low end of the totem pole; my office mate, a high school grad on an accounting internship, must make do with a 19″ CRT. The Mac user down the hall from me has a dual 2 GHz G5 with a 23″ Apple LCD. Drool.

The campus, or reservation, those being the two most common names for the facility, is also surprisingly disorganized. My office is is a brand-spanking new building on the west end, where all the new construction is taking place. The building is EMP-hardened: in the event of a nuclear war, this would mean that I could keep using my computer. In the context of my day-to-day job, however, it just means that my cell phone doesn’t work inside. At any rate, trying to find someone or something at ORNL is frequently an exercise in futility; I’m still getting lost in my own building, which is not only asymmetric, but joined at various seemingly random points on two of its three floors to two other asymmetric buildings. This disorganization extends into the mental realm as well: on several occasions during my eight-day tenure at the Lab, I’ve spent hours tracking down a particular piece of information, which is to say, the only person who knows that information. Working on a project involving a forty-year-old reactor doesn’t help, but still. Your tax dollars at work.

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