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Reading for December 3, 2009

• Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them [Design]

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  Ever wonder why computer interfaces in the movies don't look like computers in real life? >>>

  What do The Bourne Identity, Mission Impossible 3, Mr & Mrs Smith. Children of Men, and Agent Cody Banks 2 have in common? Absurd, futuristic, and totally fake software interfaces, designed in part by one man: Mark Coleran.

  Designing a fake dashboard for an imagined supercomputer or a hovering control panel for a worldwide surveillance system is an entirely different process than creating a genuinely usable UI. Your goal is to imply things: that the machine is powerful; that the villain is formidable; that the software is intuitive, but that the breadth of its powers border on unknowable. At no point does real-world usability factor in, and nor should it—this is pure fantasy, for an audience raised on Start Buttons, desktop icons and tree menus. Here's a gallery of some of the most famous interfaces; see how many you recognize.

  Coleran's UIs are a mix of old and newer than new, mingling compact pixel art, wireframes and the solid, militaristic reds, blues and blacks of software from the 80s with touch-free gesture screens and overelaborate visualizations from some vague point in the future. It's the kind of stuff you take for granted in action and sci-fi films, but rounded up in one place, it's a strangely impressive, almost cohesive view of the future of software, as designed by someone with no contraints. [Mark Coleran via Metafilter]

  

  
  

  

  

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Reading for December 3, 2009

• Every Single One of Cormac McCarthy's Works Was Typed on This [Retromodo]

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  Cormac McCarthy auctions his word-worn typewriter for charity >>>

  Cormac McCarthy has spent many years bent over this typewriter banging out books and screenplays, including All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Now, after many decades, he's giving up his trusty old gadget.

  He's not giving it up because he yearns for a newfangled bit of gear though. He's trading it for an identical model and only because it's not working as well as it should anymore. The original typewriter will be auctioned off by Christie's with all the proceeds going to a charity.

  What got to me about this whole thing though isn't that McCarthy is doing something charitable or that he's replacing a gadget. It's how he describes it in the authentication letter to be given to the winning bidder:

  It has never been serviced or cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station hose. ... I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not published. Including all drafts and correspondence I would put this at about five million words over a period of 50 years.

  Despite the lack of maintenance given to the gadget, it's easy to see that he has a genuine attachment to it, both in his words and in what he's doing. Then again, I guess we've all got some piece of old school tech that we're sentimental over, don't we? [NY Times via Obsolete]

  
  

  

  

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In Da’ Howz: Nokia N900 Finally arrives!

In Da' Howz: Nokia N900 Finally arrives!, originally uploaded by digittante.

After 4 attempts at ordering over 3 months from Nokia, Amazon, and Dell, I finally managed to get an N900 delivered today.

It's been charging since lunch time, and now that my work day is almost done, I'm getting ready to turn it on and explore its Maemo5 goodness.

Yay! Turn up the music and open the windows, it's time to play!

Reading for December 2, 2009

• Steve Ballmer Rendered in BSODs [Image Cache]

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  Title says it all >>>

  Hundreds of photos of BSODs arranged into the visage of Steve Ballmer, a stabbing, probing, flicking tongue protruding from the gaping maw in the center. Here's the tongue—oh God—up close, so you can see some of the photos:

  I kinda want to see a Steve Jobs made out of kernel panics and beach balls now. [Poorly Drawn Portraits via Fake Steve]

  
  

  

  

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Reading for November 26, 2009

• Pacific Northwest Earthquakes Could Strike Closer to Home

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  Tectonic movement close to home >>>

  

  Major earthquakes occurring along the Cascadia subduction zone off the coast of Washington state could strike closer to the state’s urban areas than some models have suggested, a new study notes.

  GPS data gathered at dozens of sites throughout western Washington hint that slippage along the interface between the North American and Juan de Fuca tectonic plates could occur as deep as 25 kilometers below the Earth’s surface, says Timothy I. Melbourne, a geodesist at Central Washington University in Ellensburg. That depth, in turn, would place the epicenters of quakes triggered along that portion of the subduction zone — some of which could exceed magnitude 9 —more than 60 kilometers inland, he and CWU colleague James Chapman report online and in the November 28 Geophysical Research Letters.

  Seafloor spreading is shoving the eastern edge of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, which runs from northern California to southern British Columbia, eastward beneath the North American plate. Long-term observations indicate that the plates are converging at an average rate of between 3 and 4 centimeters each year, says Melbourne. “With GPS, you can see plate tectonics happening on a week-to-week basis,” he notes.

  At shallow depths, where Earth’s crust is relatively cool, the tectonic interface is locked, and seismic stress builds up there until it is released during a quake. But deep beneath western Washington, at depths between 25 and 45 kilometers, the two tectonic plates slide past each other for a few days each 18 months or so. These slippage episodes are sometimes described as “silent earthquakes” (SN: 4/27/02, p. 260) but actually do register on seismometers, says Melbourne. “They’re like a magnitude-1 quake but they go on for a couple of weeks,” he notes. The total energy release in each slippage episode, if let loose all at once, would equal that in a quake with a magnitude between 6.3 and 6.7.

  The long-term GPS data provide information about where slippage is occurring and how the plates are deforming. For instance, while average plate convergence rates offshore are greater than 3 centimeters per year, those along the coast are about 2.5 cm/yr. Convergence inland, near Seattle, only adds up to about 0.5 cm/yr, says Melbourne. These trends, when combined with previous seismic data, hint that stress is accumulating along the tectonic interface at depths less than 25 kilometers, where the tectonic interface is locked.

  GPS data are a more direct way of telling where tectonic slippage is occurring and where it isn’t, says John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “That data from both GPS and seismic instruments are pointing in the same direction is comforting,” he adds.

  A major quake rupturing the 300-kilometer length of the Cascadia subduction zone that runs along the Washington coast would measure magnitude 8.9, Melbourne and Chapman estimate. If the entire 1,100-kilometer subduction zone slipped at once, the quake would be a magnitude-9.2 whopper rivaling the tsunami-spawning quake that slammed Indonesia in December 2004 (SN: 1/8/05, p. 19). Field studies suggest that quakes of such magnitude happen along the Cascadia subduction zone once every 550 years, on average. The last one struck the region in January of 1700 (SN: 11/29/97, p. 348).

  Quake hazard analyses for the region, based partially on seismic data, already account for possible tectonic slippage at depths of 25 kilometers, says Garry Rogers, an earthquake scientist at the Geological Survey of Canada in Sidney, British Columbia. Nevertheless, he notes, the new findings provide “more precise measurements than we’ve had before…. This study confirms a lot of what we’ve known about.”

  See Also:

  • 5 Most Dangerous U.S. Earthquake Hot Spots Beyond California
  • California Is Due for a Katrina-Style Disaster
  • Istanbul Opens World’s Largest Earthquake-Safe Building
  • Man-Made Dam May Have Triggered Great China Quake
  • Tsunami Risk for West Coast Higher Than Expected
  • Scientists Drill a Mile Into Active Deep Sea Fault Zone

  
  

  

  

  

  

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Reading for November 25, 2009

• Washington Post to Shut U.S. Bureaus

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  Last one out of old media, please turn out the light >>>

  A move to cut costs also reflects a mission to cover the world through the prism of Washington, D.C.

  
  

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Reading for November 24, 2009

• Get Inspiring National Geographic Images to Use as Desktop Wallpaper

  As an amateur photographer, I like to have a nice image as my desktop wallpaper to provide me with some inspiration throughout the day. Thanks to a post on freewaregenius, I just discovered that National Graphic magazine makes a huge selection of inspiring images available for desktop wallpaper use for free.

  You can get National Geographic wallpapers from two locations. The first is in the main photography section of the site. Wallpapers here are handily categorized (Adventure & Exploration,  Nature & Weather, Underwater, etc). Unfortunately, the images available in this section are only a maximum of 1280 pixels wide, which isn’t big enough for many of today’s monitors, although they should be fine on most laptops.

  Fortunately, you can also use images submitted to National Geographic’s International Photography Competition, and these are available in larger sizes (up to 1600 pixels wide). These photos aren’t categorized — you need to browse by month, but flicking through the range of beautiful images isn’t much of a chore. I currently have this image of melting ice set as my desktop background.

  If you’re still looking for more images, another great location to try is Flickr’s Explore page, which always has a huge selection of interesting and inspiring pictures.

  Where do you get wallpaper images from?

  

  

  

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Reading for November 23, 2009

• After 35 Years, Another Message Sent From Arecibo

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  Likely the highest, best example ever of what digittante is all about: creative expression using the latest technology >>>

  0xdeadbeef writes "Two weeks ago, MIT artist-in-residence Joe Davis use the Arecibo radio telescope to send a message to three stars in honor of the 35th anniversary of the famous Drake-Sagan transmission to M13 in 1974. It was apparently allowed but not endorsed by the director of the facility, and used a jury-rigged signal source on what will now be known as the 'coolest iPhone in the world.' The message encoded a DNA sequence, but no word yet on whether it disabled any alien shields. You can get the low-down on Centauri Dreams: Part 1, Part 2."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

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Arcade Fire’s Debut Album Performed by 50-Person Orchestra

Thanks to Megan Seling at Seattle's rocking alternative weekly, The Stranger, for bringing this to my attention. No matter how tired you might be from hearing Arcade Fire's debut Album Funeral in every coffee and hipster resale shop, buck up and listen to it again performed by a the Seattle Rock Orchestra:

Megan notes:

I wish the video could do it justice—to have been there in person, sitting just a row or two away from the mess of instruments, getting the perfect mix, and hearing every subtle shift of dynamics in each song... it was amazing.

The Seattle Rock Orchestra is going to do this again in February, when they celebrate the work of David Bowie.

If you dig this then be sure to 'fan' the SRG on their Facebook page: Seattle Rock Orchestra.

Source: The Seattle Rock Orchestra Does the Arcade Fire | Line Out | The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper.

ROBOTZ!: Donut Robot Mark II Spotted at Pike Market

ROBOTZ!: Donut Robot Mark II Spotted at Pike Market, originally uploaded by digittante.

I learned recently there's no standard accepted definition for the term 'robot'. Is it anything automated to repeat the same function, must it be autonomous, can it be self-powered, must it change location or be self-guided? Does it require sentience to be a robot, or is that a cyborg? If we made it (versus it regenerating or procreating itself) does that mean it's a robot?

If theres a continuum between 'us' and 'them' where on that line is the Donut Maker Robot II, and how far away from Toasters and Cylons would it be?

Reading for November 19, 2009

• Man Spoke Only Klingon to His Son for Three Years [Star Trek]

  d'Armond Speers isn't really a huge Star Trek fan. The reason he spoke only in Klingon during his son's first three years of life was to learn about the language acquisition process. Yeah, sure. What a petaQ.

  Yes, I think That Speers is such a horrid person that I had to learn how to say so in Klingon from our intern Don. It just baffles me that Speers actually sounds genuinely proud of his personal pseudo-academic project:

  I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language. He was definitely starting to learn it."

  It's great that he wanted to see how languages are picked up, but did he not think that there's potential that he hindered his son's social development by keeping focus away from a real language? I'm all for teaching foreign languages early on, but lets make it ones that are spoken on this planet, please. [Citypages viaGeekologie]

  Photo by Star Wars Blog, probably not d'Armond Speers.

  
  

  

  

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Reading for November 18, 2009

• Punks Assault People, Post Video w/Their Names in Credits

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  Smart F*cking Punks At It Again >>>

  A video of a group of boys knocking bikers over, tackling unsuspecting runners from behind, shoving kids and generally threatening folks for what appeared to be the pure fun of it was posted with the assailants identifying themselves in the credits. Cops got involved and the punks took the video down, but we have it right here.

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Reading for November 17, 2009

• Google Backs Out Of NewsHour Debate With Open Book Alliance, And I Don’t Blame Them

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  Update on Google's attempts to secure & digitize all books >>>

  There was lots of news late last week about a proposed modification to the Google Books settlement agreement. Today there was going to be more news – a televised debate about Google Books on Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour. But, alas, Google backed out.

  The details are of the fight are subtle, but all the hubub centers around what’s broadly called orphan works – where it’s hard to figure out the author/rights holder of a given work. Depending on how broadly you define orphan works, they make up between 2 million and 8 million of the 15 million or so books that have been published in the U.S. And while this is the apparent battleground, the real fight is over the whole Google Books scheme.

  Google says they’re saving humanity, or something close. Which is probably a stretch. Their opponents, fueled by donations from Google competitors (among others), says Google wants to “establish a monopoly over digital content access and distribution; usurp Congress’s role in setting copyright policy; lock writers into their unsought registry, stripping them of their individual contract rights; put library budgets and patron privacy at risk; and establish a dangerous precedent by abusing the class action process.”

  As usual, Paul Carr sorts it all out for us. And while the details of a legal settlement on how the rights around digitized copies of old printed books aren’t exactly riveting, the players involved sure do make it a lot of fun to watch.

  …Because the Open Book Alliance isn’t led by just anyone. No, one of the guys in charge over there is Gary Reback (pictured above). The man who many credit with taking down Microsoft. I interviewed Reback a few months ago, and Google Books was one of the topics we discussed.

  Reback was set to go on NewsHour to debate Google Books with the engineer that does most of the talking for Google – Dan Clancy. Both are quite able to defend their positions intelligently. Or at least, they would have. Clancy never showed up, leaving Reback at the studio, alone.

  Why did Google back out? According to Reback, Google told the show that they didn’t want to put an engineer against a lawyer on TV: “They said I was a lawyer but Clancy was not, so the debate would be unfair.” Reback says that’s ridiculous. “Clancy goes around pedaling his story and appearing on panels with lawyers all the time,” he said (which is true). Reback also notes that “Google has hundreds of lawyers, dozens of whom have worked on this. Surely, they could find a lawyer to debate if they were afraid to put Clancy up” (which is also true).

  For their part, Google says they aren’t interested in debating the legal niceties of Google Books on broadcast television. Gabriel Stricker, head of search communications at Google, says that they were told Harvard profession Robert Darnton would be their opponent on the debate (his thoughts on Google Books are here, and wow he desperately needs an editor), and that Reback was added at the last minute. When they found out about the change, Stricker says, it was too late to find an appropriate Google attorney as a replacement.

  Stricker says Google wants to have a “philosophical and ideological conversation about Google Books” in front of a mainstream TV audience, not a legal debate. And he adds “the fact that Gary finds it necessary to try to create conflict surrounding the existence of the conversation is exactly why we would prefer not to have a conversation with him.”

  And I don’t blame him. Reback is the last person I’d want to debate anything with on TV.

  Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

  
  

  

  

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Reading for November 15, 2009

• 5 Impressive Real-Life Google Wave Use Cases

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  Somethings to help get you over Google Wave's conceptual learning-curve >>>

  

  The Google Wave invite rollout extravaganza started more than a month ago. While in some respects the buzz around Google Wave has started to subside, the term is still constantly one of the top trending topics on Twitter, and new gadgets, extensions, and applications are now starting to appear on a daily basis.

  Each day more and more people are opening up their email inbox to find an invite to Google Wave. With that shiny new invite comes the inevitable quest for ideas about to how to put the medium to good use.

  Should you happen to be one of those people, we’ve got a number of different resources that you can use to get up to speed with Google Wave. This time around, however, we wanted to look at how people are actually using it now. From process modelling and customer service, to project collaboration, annotation, and gaming, the examples listed here highlight the power of the newborn medium, and in part, showcase what we can expect as the platform matures.

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  1. SAP Gravity: Modeling within Google Wave

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  Understanding the power of real-time collaboration and its relevance to clients, SAP Research in Australia has developed a business process modeling tool called Gravity that works within Google Wave.

  The sophisticated tool, which can be embedded within a Wave as a gadget, allows for team members to remotely build complex models in unison, or after catching up via playback, without having to leave Google Wave.

  Gravity and Google Wave work together harmoniously to create a modeling environment that appears to be just as robust as, if not more flexible than, expensive desktop software built for the same purpose.

  We think SAP is certainly on to something here, and we encourage you to watch the video demonstration of Gravity in Google Wave in action.

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  2. Salesforce: Google Wave for Customer Service

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  Salesforce, like SAP, has figured out that they can use the Google Wave platform to support client needs and tackle real-life problems. As such, Salesforce has created a Google Wave extension that clients can use to help automate, and even personalize, the customer service experience.

  Watch the demonstration video to see how the Salesforce extension gives customers the ability to use Google Wave to interact with an automated support robot. Of course, customers can request assistance from a human within the Wave as well.

  What makes this example stand out is the fact that not only is the Google Wave dialogue being stored as a case record within Salesforce, but, because the robot is connected to the Salesforce Service Cloud, the robot can access previously stored customer data for tailored service. Ultimately, Salesforce has found a way to potentially save clients money on customer service efforts, all the while maintaining active records, with the assistance of Google Wave.

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  3. Mingle: Integrated Project Collaboration

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  Mingle is a project management and team collaboration tool developed by ThoughtWorks Studios, who realized that they could add Mingle’s project management metadata to conversations in Google Wave.

  The integration is still a work in progress, but a demonstration of the concept was highlighted at Enterprise 2.0, and the basic idea is to give Google Wave users/Mingle clients the ability to bring their Mingle task data, which takes the form of cards, into Google Wave. Existing Mingle cards can be embedded into Wave conversation threads, and new Mingle cards/tasks can be created within Google Wave.

  This particular use case highlights how Google Wave can work with existing project management systems for more streamlined and cohesive communication, creating parity regardless of where the user is accessing project data.

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  4. Ecomm Conference: Annotating a Live Event

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  Just last week our CEO, Pete Cashmore, wrote about how the savvy people behind the Ecomm conference doled out Wave accounts to attendees so that they could collaborate, in real-time, to annotate presentation content. The result was arguably a much better way to consume conference content than attempting to follow hashtag tweets on Twitter.

  You can read the full account, which was documented by Charlie Osmond, on the FreshNetworks blog, but here’s an excerpt that we think drives home the utility of the use case.

  “Here’s what happened: an audience member would create a Google Wave and others in the audience would edit the wave during the presentation. The result would be a crowd-sourced write-up of the presentation: a transcript of key points and a record of audience comments.”

  We happen to think this particular use case is genius, especially for content-rich seminars and events where attendees are typically taking their own individual notes. With the shared Google Wave experience they can combine forces to create a more meaningful and accurate recounting of information shared in conference sessions.

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  5. Gamers: Google Wave RPGs

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  A very detailed Ars Technica post highlights that there’s a growing collection of Google Wave users who are using the medium to play wave-borne RPGs (role playing games). As mentioned in the post, there’s a even a Wave dedicated to serving as an index for all the Wave RPGs currently in existence, and the last time we counted it included upwards of 300 contributing members, and a combination of 30 different ideas or full-fledged games.

  

  According to Jon Stokes, the author of the post, Google Wave is adequate for some RPGs, but it could certainly be improved to allow for a more enjoyable experience. In the excerpt below, Stokes describes the current RPG experience within Google Wave:

  “The few games I’m following typically have at least three waves: one for recruiting and general discussion, another for out-of-character interactions (”table talk”), and the main wave where the actual in-character gaming takes place. Individual players are also encouraged to start waves between themselves for any conversations that the GM shouldn’t be privy to. Character sheets can be posted in a private wave between a player and the GM, and character biographies can go anywhere where the other players can get access to them.

  The waves are persistent, accessible to anyone who’s added to them, and include the ability to track changes, so they ultimately work quite well as a medium for the non-tactical parts of an RPG. A newcomer can jump right in and get up-to-speed on past interactions, and a GM or industrious player can constantly maintain the official record of play by going back and fixing errors, formatting text, adding and deleting material, and reorganizing posts. Character generation seems to work quite well in Wave, since players can develop the shared character sheet at their own pace with periodic feedback from the GM.”

  Image from watch4u on Flickr

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  Reviews: Australia, Flickr, Google Wave, RPG, Twitter

  Tags: Google Wave, mingle, rpg, Salesforce, SAP

  

  

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