Mile Zero
No matter where you go, there you are
February 2, 2010
Oh, man. Budget season. What a drag.
- I committed a new version of Underground to its Google Code repository the other day, adding support for Home app replacements like OpenHome, as well as Android 2.1 devices with new launchers like the Nexus One. I'll push a new version out to market as soon as I've tested it a bit. This is long overdue--hardcoding the launcher Intent was always a hack, but it was relatively low-priority until the Nexus broke it.
- Speaking of Android, remember how it's supposed to be fragmenting all over the place? Turns out that even for game developers, who are relatively "down to the metal," that's not true at all. I look forward to retractions.
- Jo Walton discusses reading science fiction as a skillset. Interesting meta-commentary, which should ring bells for anyone who's tried to get a friend or relative into the genre.
- It turns out that GPS proves the Theory of Relativity in interesting ways. Take that, Newton!
- As a tinkerer, I found Mark Pilgrim's post on the 'Tinkerer's Sunset' to be really interesting, moving stuff.
- Some Foursquare badges I'd like to see. Personally, instead of joining Foursquare, I'm just going to constantly post snarky commentary about my location on Twitter. Pretty much the same thing I do now, in other words.
- The Berkman Center hosted a lunch to discuss piracy research from the perspective of developing nations. They'll probably have a video and audio soon, but David Weinberger has a good liveblog summary. The most interesting note was that piracy is bad for open software advocates: it lets closed, for-pay software propagate as long as the software developers turn a blind eye. To what degree are grey markets (here and elsewhere) becoming a legitimate business strategy?
- Microsoft is making their own 2D data tag, in competition with QR codes and datagrid codes. You may have seen these already without knowing it: they use these on some XBox games, largely for cross-promotional and inventory purposes. I believe them when they say that these are better than QR codes, but they'll never take off for the same reason that Ogg Vorbis hasn't beat out MP3: a good-enough de-facto standard can practically live forever, and the other 2D barcode formats have all the momentum.
A little story to go with that last item: last time I ordered business cards for myself, a couple of years ago, I integrated a QR code into the graphic design of the front, and stuck one containing my v-card on the back. I thought of it as a demonstration for potential employers: who's got two thumbs (the card symbolically asks) and can navigate between the world of print and online journalism in innovative ways? This guy. But I never really thought that it'd be usable, since this was before I had a smartphone, much less anyone else I knew. I made it with a chunk of badly-translated Taiwanese freeware, and tested it with a webcam at work.
The other day after a breaking class, someone asked for my contact information, and I noticed that they had an Android phone. So I showed them how it worked, told them to grab Barcode Scanner from the market ("But I've got a different phone." "Doesn't matter, it's all Android."), and passed them a spare card. Pretty much instantly, they were able to import my card to their contact list. It was pretty cool for me, but it was even better to see the enormous grin on their face when my friend realized they had basically just pulled information out of thin air, like magic. Sometimes, technology's okay.
January 28, 2010
Yesterday I did something that I arguably should have done a long time ago: I redirected pretty much every tech blog in existence to localhost on my work laptop, effectively blocking them completely. Previously, I'd done something similar using the BlockSite plugin for Firefox, but it'd been too tempting to route around it in Chrome or IE. Not good enough: I needed them gone completely. Nuke their domains from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
I took this step in part because I agree with Anil Dash: I want to believe that I'm better than a consumer for a constant drumbeat of materialism. It's ironic that the digital computer--an infinitely-adaptable, do-anything Turing machine--has spawned an entire subculture primarily concerned with packaging those machines into an infinite array of disposable, plastic packages. Maybe I can't always resist buying more crap, but that doesn't mean I should spend my waking hours planning the next splurge.
It's also in no small measure because tech bloggers are, generally, incredibly silly people. (I know: "this food is terrible. And such small portions!" But stick with me.) I've complained here for a long time about the low quality of games journalism. As I started reading more gadget news sites a couple of years ago, gradually it dawned on me that the lack of good material in that one area was just symptomatic of a sector-wide lack of perspective. The whole thing's rotten: the completely interchangeable writers that substitute "snark" for "opinion," the rumormongering, the wafer-thin technical expertise leading to "analysis" that isn't, the constant churn through the hype machine. For me, the result is a kind of low-grade irritation, and I hear that happy people live longer.
My worst nightmare, actually, is that one day mainstream journalism--in its increasingly desparate grope for cash and readers--will model itself on Gizmodo: high turnover of largely forgettable, badly-written posts cadged from press release wire services. I like to call that the "no self-respect or job security" future, personally.
(Which reminds me--Dear mainstream journalism: we need to talk. I know it's hard, enduring this rough patch of reasonable profit margins, compared to the ridiculously exorbitant profits you enjoyed back in Ye Olde 1990s. But whenever some new tech gizmo comes out, every two-bit visionary and "innovation editor" on earth shrieks to the high heavens, insisting that this time Product X will "save the industry" from extinction at the hands of the blogging hordes. It's funny: I could have sworn we already had a way of digitally distributing news to readers on a wide range of technological platforms, including video and interactive graphics and audio clips of elected officials sniping at each other, but I can't seem to find it now. Maybe it's buried under all these browser windows that I've got lying around, left over from Twitbooking and Facetorrenting and all that other stuff the kids are into these days.)
But the sad truth of it is that the tech news deluge works. It's strangely addicting, this gossipy flood of trivia. Indeed, that's the psychological quirk that powers the entire Gawker network--pump out as much content as possible, crank up the volume, and people will find it oddly compelling. I do, at least, to the point where I wasn't very good at stepping away from it. But when I reflected on what I was actually getting out pounding the refresh button, I felt a bit like a rat at the opium feeder bar--mangy, irritable, and poorly-nourished. Prone to metaphor abuse, too, apparently.
So I'm cutting myself off. And with the time I'll gain, I hope to pick up a new hobby, or rekindle an old one. Maybe I'll finally code that pocket synthesizer I've always wanted, or get back into the online bass scene. Maybe I'll finally get past the first chapter of the book I keep starting. Or even get some actual work done! These are strange new times indeed.
January 21, 2010
As an example of what Android's doing right, it's hard to top Locale.
- It's approachably awesome: You don't have to be a nerd to see the value of automatically putting the phone on vibrate whenever you get near your office. Ditto for the ability to change ringtones based on time of day, or turn down the screen brightness when your battery gets low. This isn't some overhyped toy like augmented reality, it's a useful improvement that an average person can appreciate.
- It rewards creativity: Want to silence the phone by flipping it over? Turn on Bluetooth only when at home during certain hours? Lower the in-call volume when specific contacts with loud voices call you? Locale can do that (out of the box, no less).
- It's extensible the Android way: Locale leverages one of Android's most unsung features: the Intent message-passing mechanism. That makes writing a Locale add-on as easy as exposing a couple of preset Intent filters in your package manifest. Thanks to that kind of extensibility (a key part of the Android experience), you can get plugins that send SMS and Twitter messages, react to headphone or docking events, turn your computer on via wake-on-LAN, or hook into your to-do list for location-based reminders ("Buy milk when near the grocery store").
- It reaffirms the value of multitasking: Locale is only effective because it's always running, even when you're doing something else. You can't fake this functionality with a hack like push notifications. And despite the conventional wisdom about multitasking and battery life, Locale uses very little juice. In Android's battery usage stats, it's typically the bottom of the list, dwarfed by the demands of the screen and wireless radios. That's partly smart scheduling (Locale requests its updates in ~10 minute intervals batched with other programs, and evaluates low-power conditions like time before more expensive options like GPS), but also simply because the energy consumption of multitasking systems has been grossly overstated.
When I first started using the ADP1, Locale was one of the programs I tried and uninstalled, thinking that it was nice but overkill for my needs. As time went by, my alternatives for settings automation succumbed to either developer neglect or ridiculous feature creep (nonsense like task killers or banner ads), and had to be removed. So when Two Forty Four AM, Locale's developer team, recently released a for-pay 1.0 version, I gave it another shot, and was pleasantly surprised. During the past year, they've refined it into a polished, sharply-focused utility that's well worth the $10 asking price.
Reviews of Android phones often fault the platform for missing some single application that the reviewer has decided they can't live without--a specific Twitter client, for example, which says a lot about the priorities of tech bloggers compared to normal people. In my opinion, though, Locale really does provide the sort of functionality that ought to be a deal-breaker for other platforms, and it's a must-have for Android users. After all, isn't this sort of automation kind of the point of a "smart" phone?
January 20, 2010
I've been watching more than my fair share of BBC shows on DVD lately--Extras, Torchwood, and Life on Mars in particular. These range in quality from brilliant, decent enough if you ignore the first season, and thoroughly enjoyable, respectively. The 2000s were clearly a good decade for television on both sides of the Atlantic. That said, there's one crucial difference between the best shows in the US and the UK, as far as I can tell. The kinds of people who get starring roles in British television are markedly different from the people who star in American shows: they look like real people.
Watch, for example, Ashley Jensen's brilliant work as dim-witted actress Maggie Jacobs on Extras. Jensen's deft touch keeps Maggie from being the kind of stock "village idiot" sitcom character that the show itself lampoons, and adds a particular sting to the awkward humor. It's the kind of role that very few people could pull off with such charm, and really should have led to a wealth of future lead roles for Jensen. Maybe on British TV it will, but here it got her a bit part on Ugly Betty, perhaps because she's neither outrageously thin or glamour-model pretty.
Or compare the casts of the UK and US versions of The Office. The remake features a lot more variety in casting than most American television (and kudos for that), but the leads have still been assigned to thin, conventionally-attractive people. John Krasinski is a great, funny actor, but it's still hard sometimes not to see him as a bizarro-world Martin Freeman, and just as difficult to picture someone who looks like John Krasinski being stuck in a dead-end paper company job. Slate's Seth Stevenson gets to the heart of this when reviewing the remake of Life on Mars, noting that the cast in general is better-looking and better-known than the original--and that the new casting completely undermines the show's interpersonal dynamic. Even within genres, this holds true: there's not a single person on the entire cast of Torchwood who's as sexy as the least-attractive Galactica crew member, and while the latter is a better show, it's still kind of hard to understand how the ragtag fleet maintains such flawless fitness and perfect skin on a diet of algae and moonshine.
Why the difference? Is it that the larger pool of American talent makes it easier to find people who are both talented and blandly good-looking? Is it some kind of institutional mandate brought on by publicly-funded media? Ultimately, who cares? Diverse casting isn't a magic bullet, and there are still plenty of BBC programs I find unwatchable (confession: The IT Crowd bores the crap out of me). But there are certainly a lot of cases where it makes a show better (including many American shows: The Office, The Wire, and 30 Rock come to mind), and it's got to be healthier for the viewing audience.
January 14, 2010
It's been a big week for CQ's vote studies, which measure the presidential support and party unity of each senator and representative on a series of key votes. Our editorial and research team finished up the results for President Obama's first year in office, leading to a pair of NPR stories based on that data, in addition to our own coverage, of course.
To accompany our stories, I built a new version of our vote study visualization, leveraging what I've learned since creating the original almost two years ago. It is, as you'd expect, faster and better-looking. But there are subtle improvements included as well, ones I hope will make this a solid base for our vote study multimedia during the Obama administration.
- It's auto-bounded, with no hard-coded graph boundaries. If Rep. Walt Minnick, D-Idaho, or Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, decide to diverge from their party even more than they already do, I won't have to go in and mess with the graphing algorithms to keep them inside the plot.
- The math is more precise, and now adapts to any viewport dimensions. If we want a version of this that fits in a smaller or larger space, it will handle that without distortion.
- It's more informative. The tooltips and display mechanism have been beefed up so that more information is available at a glance, including the ability to see the name of individual members on mouseover if there's only one for that specific datapoint, and the option to see all members in a column for the distribution views.
- The "Find Member" function has been beefed up and made considerably easier to use.
- It combines my lovingly-crafted graphics and the data table view into one movie, instead of splitting them into two individually-loaded Flash objects. This, as much as anything else, has probably lowered the initialization time substantially, but it also puts all the information right at your fingertips with no need to scroll the page.
As I've said before, I'm extraordinarily proud of the work our vote study team does, and thrilled to be able to contribute to their online presence in this way. Check it out, and I'd love to hear your thoughts.
January 9, 2010
'I can't believe that!' said Alice.'Can't you?' the Queen said in a pitying tone. 'Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.'
Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said `one can't believe impossible things.'
'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'"
--Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll
Everything you've heard about Avatar is true. As a visual
experience, it's lush and seamless. At the same time, the dialog is
ludicrous, the plot is flimsy, and the message is sledgehammer blunt. It
shamelessly fetishizes native cultures while perpetuating the lame White
Man Saves Brown Blue People From Themselves plot. And
for a director known for his strong female leads (Sarah Connor, Ripley,
Lindsey Brigman), it largely relegates its women to background or
supporting roles only. And long--oh, is it long. They could have chopped
it in half, easily, and while it would have still been awful, they would
at least significantly lower the audience's risk of deep vein
thrombosis.
But these have all been discussed by countless people elsewhere (here's a good take). What struck me about Avatar, while watching a particularly leaden chunk of monologue, was the realization: not only did someone write this, they then paid someone else to deliver the lines, then threw further cash at a crew of animators to painstakingly render it--in 3D, no less. That's Avatar in a nutshell: vast, unfathomable amounts of money deployed in the service of incredible mediocrity.
The general viewpoint, by those who enjoyed the movie anyway, seems to be that these elaborate visuals compensate for the flaws in the writing, editing, and direction. Disagreeing with this makes me feel like something of a Grinch, since words like "wonder" tend to get thrown around when discussing its landscapes and weird alien horses, and I do hate being accused of a lack of wonder. We're supposed to applaud the extensive craft that went into Cameron's project, according to this view.
But from my perspective, we're a bit like the White Queen these days, in a state of constant suspended disbelief. We're surrounded by amazing images. During my lifetime, I've seen the state of the art go from the NES to the PS3, from stop-motion to Up. A few years ago they made Fred Astaire dance with a vaccuum cleaner in a commercial, an act which at the time was an arresting (if necromantic) idea, and is now pretty much unremarkable. My phone can superimpose directions to the nearest Waffle House on the view in front of me, for heaven's sakes. I see six impossible things before breakfast. Games or movies or whatever, it ought to take a bit more than a well-rendered forest scene to impress us, or pull us in emotionally.
So instead of applauding, I think about the stories that could have been told with this kind of technology if it were given to more playful or inventive directors--Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Chris Nolan, or Guillermo del Toro, for example. It's hard not to feel a profound sense of waste, because these are directors that have accomplished what Cameron is supposed to have done: show us something that we've never seen before. Even the Wachowskis (and there's something I thought I'd never say again): think about what a mind-blowing experience The Matrix was the first time you saw it. Now there was a movie that used novel, elaborate special effects to actively mess with your sense of reality, as well as to tell a story that--if not completely original--at least aspired to more than surface depth.
But then, maybe that's the problem. Set out to tell an interesting story that requires some new effects, and you get The Matrix or Dark City. Aim to blow people's minds solely through the power of your budget, and you get The Matrix Reloaded--or Avatar.
January 6, 2010
As part of my new team leader position at CQ, I get to pick which technologies and platforms our multimedia team will use for its projects. This is less impressive than it sounds: for content management reasons, our team often has to work separately from the rest of the CQ.com publishing platform, so it's not like I get to decide the fate of the organization. In any case, today I want to talk about a particular aspect of the limited power I do have: the use of "web standards" in creating online journalism.
Almost nobody thinks of news organizations as online tech leaders, but we create a lot of content that regular people (i.e. not nerds) actually read and interact with. There's a strong push online for content creators (including media organizations) to employ standards--and by standards, what's usually meant is strict HTML (including the proposed new tags in HTML 5) instead of Flash. It's an approach with several advantages, including searchability (unlike Rupert Murdoch, I welcome search engines), mobile readiness (until Adobe gets their ARM plugin working), better text and mash-up capabilities, and better UI consistency. We generally start project planning with HTML/Javascript as a possible solution.
But it's wrong to think that we should avoid Flash for ideological reasons instead of jumping in the moment it becomes more convenient--and frankly, the "web standards" approach is often anything but convenient, particularly for interaction and rich graphics. Building good-looking UI components out of div tags or fighting with stylesheets is not my idea of a good time. And it's not just painful, it's much less productive compared to the rapid pace of development in Actionscript. I personally feel that the speed factor--the time it takes for me to write a complex, rich application--is something that web standards groups aren't spending enough time on, frankly. The <aside> tag won't help me create content faster, while making CSS behave in a sane and easily predictable fashion would, but there are working groups for the former and seemingly none for the latter.
(Advocates for these "semantic" tags, by the way, would do well to read Arika Okrent's In The Land of Invented Languages, particularly the parts about the "philosophical" conlangs, which attempted--and failed miserably--to create a logical, self-evident classification for all the concepts we express in our messy and meaning-overloaded "natural" languages. Sound familiar?)
HTML 5 proponents point to its new tags (such as <canvas> or <video>) as alternatives, an idea that should make even the most inexperienced Actionscript developer chuckle in cynical mirth. Canvas in particular is phenomenally unsuited to replace Flash's animation and interaction capabilities, as a single glance at the API tutorial should make clear. All drawing is done manually on every frame, transforms are awkward, and compositing is done in the most confusing possible manner. It's fine for simple graphs and charts, but I'd have to re-implement the equivalent of Actionscript's display list--its powerful, tree-based rendering engine--and its event dispatch libraries from scratch before canvas could be useful. Our team's time is too valuable to spend hacking around on that kind of low-level functionality instead of producing actual journalism. Not to mention the time it would take to replace Actionscript's enormous library of other utility code in the DOM (also known as the world's worst programming API).
Besides, the realpolitik of the web is that most of our readers are probably still on IE, and it has no current or planned support for canvas, much less audio and video tags. We're producing work for a mass audience--we can't afford to be purists, especially since more people have Flash Player installed than have a browser capable of high-performance JavaScript anyway. Flash is more consistent across browsers than supposedly "standard" code, as well. Ultimately, it's managed to do what Java never really managed, and what the browser has accomplished only with great difficulty: create a cross-platform application platform that people will actually use.
All of which to say that I just can't get worked up when people start ranting about killing off Flash and replacing it with "standards"-based design. As far as I'm concerned, Actionscript has become a de-facto standard for the web, one that anyone can leverage (the free Flex SDK and FlashDevelop IDE are a must-have combo). By all means, let's put pressure out there for less centralized and more open solutions, ones that aren't owned by a single corporate entity. But in the meantime, if we want to get things done, there are two options. We can shun Flash out of spite, in favor of solutions that require more work for less return. Or we can start telling news stories in interesting ways using this technology. I know which path my team is going to take.
January 4, 2010
- Celebrated five years together with Belle, an achievement for which few words would be sufficient. Thanks, babe!
- Mostly followed my gaming resolutions from last year. Definitely played more indie titles, skipped tedious grinding, and avoided console shooters when possible. Did not get around to trying an MMO, which was probably for the best.
- Bought a Kindle 2 and an Android Dev Phone. Became a developer for the latter, much to my dismay.
- Wrote about a quarter of a game engine, then quit when I got to the parts that aren't instantly gratifying (preloading, faux-threading, AI). Still managed to learn way more than anyone should know about high-performance Actionscript optimization.
- Survived a congressional session, a corporate purchase, and a promotion.
- Survived a mild case of extensor tendonitis, and resolved to take better care of my hands.
- Rewrote my personal subset of Blosxom in PHP, increasing the speed of this blog by an order of magnitude. Resisted the urge to convert to a real publishing platform like Wordpress. Purged a number of old entries, while I was at it.
- Read a fair number of books, including a long, miserable slog through Chris Anderson's Free.
- Began taking breakdancing classes, which (after six months) qualifies me as something of a b-boy-in-training, I guess. Lost about 20 pounds in the process, but failed (so far) to conquer a general deficiency of flavor.
Reviewer's notes: The special effects may be showing their age, and portions seemed rushed or in need of additional polish. But overall, 2009 delivered a solid annual experience, not to mention a definite improvement over previous franchise installments. Possible candidate for Year of the Year. Score: 9/10
December 28, 2009
Happy holidays! Between festivities and the blizzard, it's been almost two weeks since I wrote here, but posting has been slow for several months anyway. The main reason is that I've been increasingly busy at CQ as the new Multimedia Team Leader since the end of November. As such, I'm responsible for directing the team's choice of technology, projects, and long-term strategy. It's a nice step forward for me professionally, but it eats up a lot of time and mindshare that might have normally gone into blogging.
I don't believe, as many journalism-watchers do, that print is dead. On the contrary, I think it's possible to argue that print retains an audience capable of supporting newspapers, just not at the same elevated level of profit that was once routine for the industry. But as someone who self-identifies as a "new media" journalist, my primary focus is the organizational transition toward a print-online hybrid journalism, with the eventual goal of moving entirely online as print inevitably becomes untenable. The Multimedia Team Leader is an opportunity for me to more directly play a role in that process, one that I'm sure will prove both frustrating and exciting in turn.
As for Mile Zero, rather than beating myself up over the frequency of updates, I'm going to a more relaxed schedule--slightly meatier posts once or twice a week, hopefully. I'm also going to try tweaking the subject matter a bit--I feel like it's gotten a bit review-ish lately, and that's not a place I really want to be. Anyway, pardon the digression, and thanks for reading. Here's to 2010!
December 17, 2009
It's officially too cold for words in DC this morning, which means that as of yesterday anything I own with a touchscreen just became utterly useless. Consider this a triumph of frostbite over functionality, brought to you by product designers who live in eternally balmy climates instead of the real world.
At least the Android Dev Phone is usable, if clumsy, thanks to the trackball. People scoffed at the trackball, the menu button, and the chin they rode in on, but those people have to take their gloves off to check their e-mail. Which is not to say that it's any fun using the trackball through a pair of gloves (it's way too small), but it's possible. Gloved typing on the physical keyboard also works surprisingly well. And by surprisingly well, I mean "badly."
The Zune HD, on the other hand, is basically just taunting me. See, it's got a button on the side, the express purpose of which is to directly trigger a screen overlay for controlling playback and volume. I guess it would have been too much to ask for actual buttons to control those things, particularly the commonly-used song skip functions. Of course, these days, even players with physical controls probably run them on capacitive technology anyway, so you still can't use them. I'm pretty sure that's just spiteful.
And then there's the Kindle, which doesn't use a touchscreen at all. Great! Someone gets it! I can read with gloves on, just like an actual book! Here's what they don't tell you about the Kindle, or any e-ink reader: cold temperatures slow the already-slow refresh rate. It goes from being subliminal to seriously annoying as the temperature gets down below freezing. What's that? Paper? What am I, a neanderthal?
At this point, my options are to either go Amish, or move to a place with a milder winter and a functioning public transit system. Frankly, it's a tough call.
