Monthly Archives: January 2010

Chromium

Posted on 2010-01-31 by pappp

I downloaded Chromium (google chrome, but purely FOSS, so there is a build that can be grabbed directly from the Arch repos) to play with this weekend, and it is way more promising than last time I played with it. In particular, I wanted to see if the touted speed benefits were real, and see if there was a viable alternative after the massive UI (”Open in new tab” is a critical feature for tabbed browsers…), resource consumption, and stability regressions in Epiphany after it’s switch from Gecko to WebKit.

I should note that my browser usage is a little weird; I keep one Firefox window per topic (usually 3-4) on my first virtual desktop, plus an instance of Epiphany on the second virtual desktop, which is used for mail (it stays logged in to my google account, Firefox doesn’t), banking and various other things I’d rather not have logged in alongside my normal browsing, or brought down when I manage to crash Firefox.

As for Chromium itself (I’m using “Chrome” and “Chromium” interchangeably here):

The good:
* Fast. Very, very fast. Especially javascript, which is it’s claim to fame.
* Responsive. The UI is WAY more responsive than Firefox, I’m yet to have a “did that work?” moment with it.
* The default new tab behavior that places text entered to a new tab into a google search is correct as far as I’m concerned, I’ve had Firefox set up that way for ages.
* Per-tab processes to prevent broken pages from taking down the browser.
* Extensions in separate processes. This is probably the best feature, Flash crashes all the time on my machines, and I hate having to restart Firefox to get it back.
* Incognito windows. This is a partial solution to the logged in/not logged in issue that makes me keep two browsers up.
* Perfect default tab opening behavior; tabs created from “Open link in new tab” open next to the parent tab, tabs created by ^+T open at the end of the bar. I’ve never managed to make that work consistently right in Firefox, despite having a nice extension to do so.

The bad:
* That “innovative” UI that doesn’t integrate with the desktop theme, and gets clumsy when you turn on the “Use System Title Bar and Borders” option in the vain hope that it will help.
* That same “innovative” UI that puts the tabs in that awkward fitts-law worst case scenario place close enough to the edge of the screen to require long travel, but not close enough to get edge benefits. I am not alone in this opinion, would it really be so bad to add an option to fix that?
* No scrolling tab bar. I usually have several windows with <20 tabs each, but if I spawn tabs for all the interesting unread threads in a forum or somesuch, I really like to be able to read the titles.
* Ravenous memory and cycle consumption: if you think Firefox is bad about consuming resources, just wait until you see Chrome. Then again, the latest builds of Epiphany have a nasty habit of bugging out taking up some CPU time constantly, and Chrome is way better than that.
* Awkward bookmark-group behavior. There is a “open all in new window” feature (which is very cool), but it extends to sub-folders (which is not).

Overall, it is definitely my new second-choice browser, and I’ll keep it installed to use when I have problems with Firefox. I might even switch despite the UI issues; some of the above features are really nice, and adblock works just as well with chrome (this is very important for my primary browser). It should be neat seeing the next few versions of Chrome and Firefox, real competition (sorry IE and Opera, you don’t really count) is a wonderful thing.

EDIT: Apparently adblock doesn’t work quite as well in Chrome, Firefox adblock actually prevents ad material from downloading, Chrome adblock simply prevents it from rendering. Not an issue with a fast connection and fast machine, but you might want to go ahead and fix your hosts file to get rid of the more egregious offenders anyway.

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Blackboard for the Lose

Posted on 2010-01-31 by pappp

I never used Blackboard as an undergrad, and from my experiences this semester using it as a student in my PSY562 class, and a TA for EE281, I am very, very glad. Every time I log into Blackboard, I get the feeling it was designed by people who have heard of the Internet, but never actually used it.

The UI is totally incohesive, painfully slow(I tried several different browsers, including Chromium, faster javascript engines don’t help much), and woefully difficult to interpret, on top of being simply ugly.

My biggest complaint however is the grade input interface (which is hard to show without running afoul of FERPA); I want a TABLE. It could be a fancy javascript spreadsheet like google docs. It could be a HTML table full of HTML textboxes with a submit button (as long as the tabbing order is column-major). It could demand some format of file upload, so long as it was capable of incremental updates. Instead, there is a nigh-unusable single-shot file upload widget, with no incrementing support, and a clumsy javascript table-thing which posts per-cell, making it miserably slow to enter to. For now, I’m just keeping grades in a spreadsheet on my machine, and taking some time each week to synch it up with blackboard, because directly using the interface is too infuriating.

I’m also noting that I’m not the only one who has issues with making Blackboard work. There is delicious irony in that more often than not there are emails or before-class discussions about failures in interacting with blackboard (usually including the instructor) in my class on Human Technology interaction.

These criticisms are aside from the issues I have with Blackboard, LLC Being dicks with (since invalidated) patents they shouldn’t have been granted in the first place

Sadly, playing with the public demo of Moodle, which seems to be the most successful open-source Course Management System, I find it really isn’t much better on most fronts, but does seem substantially more responsive, and has a slightly more cohesive UI. More importantly, it isn’t any worse, is not large tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars (ref, may have to push “Guest Login” to view) per year in licensing fees, and, as an open project, is more likely to improve with time.

Seriously, why is anyone using this thing? Is it convenient for the admins? (I doubt it with how often it seems to be down) Was it just a buzzword for a while, so everywhere that wanted to look like they were keeping up with educational technology bought a license, then couldn’t get rid of it? Does blackboard LLC have really good kickbacks for the IT people who make purchasing decisions? It doesn’t even have the obvious link with finance trolls like the other terrible, expensive software UK has adopted to explain it.

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Dollhouse.

Posted on 2010-01-30 by pappp

SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS!
I just got to the last episode of Dollhouse, and far from my “OK, not great ” impression when the show started: Oh Fuck Yes!

The plot got complicated in wonderful ways, the characters became interesting and compelling, and (in retrospect, probably most importantly) the acting stepped up; Eliza Dushku (Echo) and Fran Kranz (Topher) get their “crazy” roles down perfectly by the end; Echo really does seem to shift between personalities visible from the earlier episodes, and composite states thereof (the best are the composite/Caroline transitions), and Topher really does come off as a shattered genius. Even the actors I strongly associate with previous roles mostly rolled over; Eliza Dushku as Echo instead of Faye and Tahmoh Penikett as Paul Ballard instead of Karl “Helo” Agathon stopped having that weird “third character” effect for me only a few episodes into the series, and Summer Glau as Bennett Halverson instead of River Tam, and Alan Tudyk as Alpha instead of Wash were mostly de-aliased, but only mostly; partly as a function of screen time and partly as a function of the relative similarity of the characters. It’s worth noting that three of the four character aliases are from other Whedon series.

The end of the plot arc is a solid ending to almost all the threads, and it completes the way I would have liked in almost every way: Most importantly, it works out such that the solution to a technological problem is understanding and improving technology (not necessarily the same technology; in this case it was). I pretty strongly feel that way about all sorts of tech, and in particular like that it stresses that the worst thing to do is to try to hoard or hide a technology, as that is how it comes to be abused. I was also very pleased with some of the character choices; the sympathetic interpretation of Adelle is mostly affirmed (and the odd, vaguely oedipal relationship between Adelle and Topher is just neat characterization.)
I think the only big issues is that I would have liked an extra season in the middle to develop things at a more stable pace, particularly the Boyd/Rossum plot, and the redemption of Alpha, which just kind of appear in the second-to-last and last episodes respectively.

As for the closing episode itself, the aesthetic for Epitaph Two is spectacular; it cues from Fallout and Mad Max (I believe it actually made a couple of in-joke references to each), and has the same Whedon last desperate battle feel from Serenity (which, frankly, is a good look.)

A couple of my favorite quotes from the closing episode:
Topher to Adelle: “I’ll fix what we did to their heads, You’ll fix what we did to the rest of the world — Your job is wayyy harder”
Echo: “It’s just the next thing.” (on spending years underground in order for actives to retain their memories when the world is reset… and the reset itself.)

For someone watching from the start (and everyone with even the slightest inclination toward scifi really should), do watch in broadcast order. Having Epitaph One in the middle really does enrich the mystery of the second season.

Now the last (non-terrible) Sci-Fi standing (at least until Warehouse 13 and Stargate Universe come back on) is Caprica, which has just started actually running. Hopefully it lives up to its pilot, it was promising in many of the same ways Dollhouse proved to be interesting.

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Reference Manager

Posted on 2010-01-27 by pappp

I’ve decided I need to start using a reference manager utility. My old system of keeping a text file full of BibTeX entries in a folder with pdf’s, with an extra “file:” field for the file name of the document is a little crude, and starting to break down as I get large piles of documents for some topics.

Because my PSY562 class this semester is largely using readings from HFES journals, I’m going to use the pile it generates as a testbed to find something I can use generally.
My requirements for a reference manager include:
* Accepts and Emits BibTeX Citations
* Capable of linking citations to files
* Storage format which is (roughly) human readable
* Easily transported database
* FOSS
* Works on Linux
* Limited dependencies (I’d prefer to avoid Java or Qt)
* Works without network connection

The most widely used solution, EndNote, fulfills very few of the above (plus, interoperability dickishness, but fortunately there are lots of projects to make reference managers floating around the ‘net that seem promising. Unfortunately, most of the promising ones are dead. The best of the actively-developed bunch seems to be Referencer. Referencer is a C++/gtkmm app (so it plays nice with my XFCE4 environment), with a Python plug-in system (Should I ever choose to use it), reasonably limited ties to the various non-GTK gnome libraries, and stores it’s records in XML. It looks remarkably close to what I want, and has some features I didn’t know I wanted (preview icons, tags) that are pretty useful. I think it’s going to be a keeper, but would love to hear what other people are using.

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Pets, Power Tools, Firearms, and Furniture

Posted on 2010-01-26 by pappp

I’ve recently had several discussions, with a variety of people, about things I might like to own, but am not willing to at this stage in my life, and an interesting meta-discussion on the matter with my mother. The reactions seem to imply this is an unusual enough idea that it is interesting simply for being novel, even though it seems perfectly logical (in my mind anyway).

The basic premise of my willingness to own things, in addition to the normal “will I derive pleasure/utility commiserate with the expenditure” sort of thought (which tends to make me not want much anyway), is dictated by the following argument “I shouldn’t buy anything that will still be around in a year, I will want to keep, and I won’t be able to keep if I am in graduate student housing in another state.” I tend to use MIT as the straw man because 1. There is awesome stuff going on there, that I would like to be involved with, and 2. The housing situation in Boston sucks, because, well, Boston continues to be a dense population center for no reason I can discern.

It’s never really made sense to me to buy nice things knowing I’ll have to give them up, when I can simply wait until it is more convenient, and the fact that this attitude keeps my living expenses ridiculously low is a nice bonus. I use the titular set as an example, because they pretty well cover all the angles of the idea, and the set tends to have at least something that makes sense to anyone I am talking to. To elaborate a little bit (Topic/Desire/Reason Not/Holdover Solution):

Pets: I’ve always had cats, and love having them around v. not generally allowed in student housing. So, enjoy the house mate’s cats for now.

Power Tools: I love fabricating things v. space, weight, mess; this is about large stuff, not hand drills and rotary tools. The flip side is I’m getting REALLY good at improvising things with hand tools.

Firearms: Shooting is fun, and I currently reside in a region where it is a widely accepted hobby v. not generally allowed in student housing, legal concerns depending on locale, and incompatibility with my desire to avoid keeping a car. The fact that it is an area where there are people who shoot means I know people who periodically invite me along, and thus I get to shoot for only the cost of range fees and ammunition.

Furniture: It would be nice to accrue nice stuff for storage and work areas while I’m in a gigantic nice house v. space, student housing is typically mostly furnished. Because I mostly compute on laptops, my desk is “enough” space, and there is an improvised workbench in the garage made of a headboard and pair of dead A/C units that were out there when we moved in for messy things.

When discussing this idea with my mother (From whom I largely inherited this attitude), she brought up another neat fact. She reads horrible finance books for fun, and ran across one recently that mentioned some research, which, in addition to the fairly well known (I think?) link between children of people with thrifty habits held-over from the great depression and hoarding behavior, discussed a link between (descendants of) Japanese-Americans interred during World War II (please, please tell me this isn’t novel to anyone.), and an attitude that “I shouldn’t own unnecessary nice objects because they could be taken from me at any time” …Which one might argue the my attitude is descended from.

I’ve had had that idea before, observing how my family operates, and now want to go article finding because I didn’t expect there to be evidence as to which factor was the source of the behavior, or serious research on the topic. A quick googling doesn’t turn anything up, but I always love legitimate studies to verify my passing thoughts; sometime (”In my copious spare time”) I will have to have a wallow in consumer psychology literature, it looks interesting.

EDIT:
The inital horrible finance book was apparently Mind over Money, (which is a (un)remarkably common title, but probably Mind Over Money: Overcoming the Money Disorders That Threaten Our Financial Health. This is not a recommendation.) and referenced the authors (but not the text) of D. J. O’Brien, S. Fugita The Japanese American Experience (google books link with partial text).

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Kentucky Touch screen / Natural User Interface meeting

Posted on 2010-01-22 by pappp

Earlier tonight I attended a sort of open-access seminar on multi-touch user interfaces, catalyzed by an EE senior design group working with Awesome Inc. to create a large multi-touch wall for the outside of their space. The attendece was wonderfully diverse on account of the announcement hitting the professional, academic, and hobbyist communities in Lexington (more events need to propagate like that!). Attendees included several members from the Lexington IEEE chapter (co-opted as a chapter meeting), a number of local creative types, many students from UK, and several other interesting folks.

The discussion centered around the CCV effort of the NUI group, and was fairly solid, although I would have appreciated a bit more technical depth. I actually ended up dominating a couple conversations on account of being better read in the area than most of the other attendees, and don’t consider myself particularly well-versed in multi-touch display technology. I still don’t really understand TUIO, I was rather hoping someone there would be able to explain it.

One small downside, I still get the uncomfortable feeling that everything said or done at Awesome is being sucked in and analyzed as a potential source of financial gain. The culture there always seems exploitative (or at the very least commercial) instead of communal, which is very unfortunate, as they have set up a nice space, and seem to be attracting interesting events.

I really am attracted to open-access, discussion based topic seminars like this, and would love to see more of them happen. There are lots of good efforts to bring that sort of thing to Lexington, from a seminar series Dr. Finkel is attempting to arrange this semester (based on students and faculty giving short presentations on neat things they have found), to Collexion and Dorkbot’s regular meetings. This is not the first time I’ve been after this sort of thing either, for a while the UK LUG was running some decent events in this vein, in particular I remember a successful LUG event on PyGTK, but the LUG is several years defunct…again…because those of us who were active didn’t have time to keep it going on our on (and be students), and no one else stepped up. I think some of the short-form lecture series like ignite have had events here as well, but those have never seemed as useful to me.

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A Tiny Plastic Dot

Posted on 2010-01-20 by pappp

(This is very much an example of one of the little manic episodes that make me a good generalist/appear high functioning)
The left touchpad button on my laptop (Thinkpad T60p, hostname Monolith) has been “limp” for a while. It bothers other people who use my machine, because (objectively) it really does feel very wrong, but it had broken gradually and I had acclimated enough that it didn’t bother me. Last night I started paying attention to the problem, and it became maddening, so I decided to see if I could fix it. I looked at the problem last time I had the machine apart, so I knew there was a torn plastic tactile dome to blame. It is (as best as I can make out) impossible to order just the appropriate domes, and a whole new touchpad is 1. defeatist, 2. about $12 from shady ebay sellers, and 3. requires waiting for it to be shipped. I decided a better (ie. creative, free, immediate, and credit-card-fraud free) solution would be to go rummage in the parts bins, find a sufficiently similar tactile dome in something dead, and install it. The closest match I could find was the keyboard domes from the corpse of my old VPR Matrix 180B5 (The worst made laptop I have ever encountered. Every bit as fragile as one would expect something made by a Best Buy house brand to be, even though it was basically a re-badged Samsung P10. Polystyrene is not chassis material.) I now have a partial match (it’s a little too weak, and not “snappy” enough) installed, which is good enough to keep it from being bothersome.
Thinking about tactile domes reminded me of a fabulous article I read (I thought) about them several years ago. It turns out it was a much more general article about handheld devices, but it really was fabulous. The article is “Handhelds of Tomorrow” from the April 2002 issue of Technology Review. Ideo has a PDF available outside a paywall. The part about the tactile bubbles was one little subsection about Peter Skillman, who was “the hardware guy” at palm/handspring (weird corporate history).
The search for the article reminded me of a previous kick on the work of one of the other important palm/handspring people, Jeff Hawkins, who in addition to being a founder of both companies, is doing amazing work in neuroscience as it relates to computing, and has written a book On Intelligence and given a awesome TED talk on the topic.
Hurrah for (hypo)manic episodes?

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Really Trijicon?

Posted on 2010-01-19 by pappp

This is pretty much a re-blog, which I don’t usually like doing, but the story is so mind-bendingly stupid it bears hating on in as many venues as possible.

Story Here. Reblogging from boingboing.

The short version is, Trijicon, who make (apparently very nice) gun optics, took it upon themselves to emboss references to bible verses into the ends of the serial numbers of the ones they are selling to the US military (as part of very large contracts). That are going into combat in the middle east. In that conflict where the most important thing we can do is win the PR war with a skeptical populace. A linchpin of doing so is demonstrating that there is no religious motivation, to avoid invoking centuries of violence and hatred, and legitimizing the arguments of the other side that we are invading crusaders (although even dumber presidents have trouble keeping that straight).

The most obnoxious part is that, rather than playing it down and claiming the sequences are just part of the identifier (optics nomenclature is easily confusing enough to make something convincing up), Trijicon went ahead and confirmed that they had intentionally added bible verses, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that it might be a Bad Thing. At least they were clever enough to to choose verses having to do with light.

Any attempt to play down the degree to which this is stupid should be met with consideration of the media/public shitstorm that would occur if someone were found attacking Americans with a weapon engraved with quranic references. I’ve always read that humans were supposed to develop a theory of mind that supports this kind of reasoning around 4 years of age, but sometimes I wonder.

With stupid behavior like the above, supplanted by things like groups thinking it is a good idea to send audio bibles as aid to Haiti, it’s no wonder there is such suspicion of (Christian) religious motivation in US foreign policy. When reading the audio bibles article, I couldn’t help but picture those propaganda-spewing eyebots from Fallout 3, but the pictures on the organization’s website just show a cheap self-powered boombox with a flash card. At least they have useful parts in them, solar panels and hand-crank generators to keep personal communication devices powered are pretty high on the list of things I would want in a large scale disaster, and since Haiti has been in one sort of disaster or another pretty much continuously since the late 1400s when the first Europeans showed up, I imagine there are plenty of folks around who know how to improvise.

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Alan Kay and ACTA

Posted on 2010-01-18 by pappp

As an amusing aside from the previous post, thinking about early HCI work and reading about all the ACTA nastiness (wikipedia link for pseudo-neutrality, my feelings are more in line with the “What the F*CK!” stance over at this BoingBoing post) at the same time reminded me of one of the most amusing bits from Alan Kay’s original publication on the Dynabook concept (from which most modern ubiquitous computing descends) A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages:

The ability to make copies easily and to “own” one’s information will probably not debilitate existing markets, just as easy xerography has enhanced publishing (rather than hurting it as some predicted), and as tapes have not damaged the LP record business but have provided a way to organize one’s own music.

He may have been a little off on that front, the ability to make an infinite number of perfect copies (something that neither xerography or cassettes can do), and distribute them over arbitrary distances for virtually nothing did change things in ways that don’t really leave room for the old-school media middle-men. The fact that technology has changed the world is not something to be legislated against, particularly when doing so will will criminalize socially normal behavior by those who adapted, to benefit those who did not.

The latter portion of Dollhouse (which is way, way better than the first few) is largely about this kind of (un)intended consequences of technology (which is something I really enjoy thinking about), and has kept it on my mind, but I’m going to wait until the last (booo!) episode airs later this week to babble about that.

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HCI: Information Theory or Ergonomics

Posted on 2010-01-18 by pappp

I was doing the first (actually, second, the first was an article from perennial human factors design blowhard Donald Norman, just like I was joking it would be) reading for my PSY562 class, and was kind of disturbed by the degree to which the book seems to treat human technology interaction as a totally pragmatic enterprise that essentially reduces to ergonomics. This stance may make sense with simple mechanical systems, but the human computer interaction I am most familiar with has always seemed more meaningfully posed as an information theory problem than a simple issue of lubricating a system.

Looking at the big HCI pioneers, we get people like Ivan Sutherland, who’s most famous work, sketchpad, was done as his PhD. project under Claude “The father of information theory” Shannon, and Douglas Engelbart (of hypertext and the mouse), who thought of HCI as a matter of Intelligence Amplification which is more “transhumanism” than “building better tools”.

This may just be an artifact of the bad nomenclature in the field; some people, particularly in Europe, tend to use “ergonomics” as a name for the whole field of human technology interaction (Or human-centered design, or human factors, or any of half a dozen names with slightly different implications…). The inconsistent nomenclature is to be expected in a field that draws from so many other more established fields; psychologists, engineers, and designers all tend to use different, incompatible vocabulary with different, incompatible shades of meaning, but that doesn’t really make the situation less bothersome. I’m partial to phrases like “Human Technology Interaction,” because they imply accordances on both sides of the line. Terms like “Human Centered Design” always strike me as implying a system of presenting shallow models to make things “easier” for users, which don’t actually take into account the real mechanisms of the underlying system. This kind of design tends to be grossly inefficient for the technology, and break down as soon as something unexpected happens. It should make for fun discussion in class.

Related Note: While looking at related material, I FINALLY put together that “Intelligence as an emergent property of (reducible) distributed systems” Danny Hillis and “Chief architect/co-founder of Thinking Machines” Danny Hillis are the same person, who was also a student of Claude Shannon. How the fuck did I never put that together?

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