simon allardice

Planned Obsolescence

simon — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:23:00 GMT

I try to be good; I try to make multiple backups. What I hate most is that knawing feeling that you hope that at the end of the day, what you just did was completely pointless. You don't want to use them. You want to look at your backup media in 10 years and think "Huh. Oh yeah. I guess I can toss that now."

But we're in that weird phase of technology where it's more of a pain in the ass than it used to be. Documents are easy. You can have duplicates all over God and creation: a key drive (or two or three of four), on CD, Mozy, Amazon S3, whatever. Music and video are another matter. Currently, I have nearly 100 GB of fairly well-organized music. A little too large to store easily in a cloud, whether something like Amazon S3 or whatever the hell Windows Live Mesh will turn out to be. External drive? Sure, they're already there. But still, that's storage, not backup. And I don't want a freakin' RAID array in the house, because it strikes me as yet another soon-to-be-archaic technological solution, like having my own butter churner. Even a standalone external hard drive strikes me as something that five years from now, will seem just... stupid... "so, grandpa, when you were younger you actually had spinning discs of crash prone magnetic media in a powered box on your desk? Wow. "

I know, the cloud's coming. But okay, we're not there yet. The pipes aren't fat enough, the storage isn't quite cheap enough just yet. So I occasionally have a day where I'm mentally too toasted for creative stuff and just go on autopilot through some low-priority to-do items like "create backups of music" but even just burning the DVDs and labeling them, I'm thinking ewww, how archaic. I know I'm going to look at this disc in seven years, the way right now I look at a disc marked "5/1/2001 various documents, emails etc" and wish I could have gotten that part of my life back.

First Person

simon — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:37:00 GMT

I suck at Starcraft.

This would no doubt win me no friends in Korea, but it has to be said. I just don't click with management games, building games, God games. Starcraft, SimCity, Civilization. Any of 'em.

It's not that I dislike them. I can quite understand why people play them. But their and my game+player lego simply doesn't click. And trust me, I've tried. This goes back to SimCity on the C64 nearly twenty years ago. I've given them a fair shot. It's just not working out for us.

For a few years, I was on the organizing committee for the SIGGRAPH conference. Almost to a man, my colleagues on the committee all loved Starcraft.They excelled in managing resources, organizing little virtual people, they'd get together in the evenings to have laptop gatherings and organize each other into the ground. I preferred rocket launchers.

In retrospect, that should have been a clue as to why they enjoyed the whole big-conference resource-organization thing and why I found it painful and would wish to retreat to my BFGs and berserker leaps into a whirling morass of bullets. That I am almost certain to be slaughtered, I care not a jot. If there was ever an apt image for my gameplaying it would be a character tearing down a hill towards a sea of enemies, screaming in apoplectic rage, wearing nothing except blue warpaint and a chain gun.

Ah, Unreal Tournament, how well ye know me.

(This is not solely a computer-game-only characteristic of mine. When I play pool in real life, I am a distinctly average and unremarkable player, but only if I am able to restrain myself from my natural "hit it as hard as possible just to see if the rebound effect does something interesting" tendency.)

I've never clicked with MMORPG games, either. I haven't spent a single second on World of Warcraft. Spent a good few hours trying out Lord of the Rings Online earlier this year: carefully chose and built my character, killed a metric buttload of boar, completed a whole slew of quests. Even squelched my loner characteristics enough to team up with a bunch of other players to complete Team Quests. Other players were helpful and charitable to the n00b that I was.

And tried not to keep thinking what this game really needs is more rocket launchers.

Mojito

simon — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 04:20:00 GMT

Mojito is the name I'm using for a Graffiti-compatible version of by Kyle Neath's Hemingway theme for Wordpress.

Hemingway has its share of enthusiasts and detractors. Mainly they consider the navigation to be somewhat lacking. Form follows function, folks: it's a blog theme. Don't use it on a site that requires substantial multi-level navigation. True, it's not a forgiving theme: to someone who'll just start adding widgets and plugins and google ads without considering how they'd affect the look, it stinks. Instead, it's a theme that rewards the attention of its user. I've always liked it; it's a simple theme, but like many simple things, must have taken an age to get the arrangement right.

So, that's why.

Oh, and why the name "Mojito"? Well, it's one of the few pieces of Graffiti that Hemingway wrote, in the La Bodeguita bar in Cuba.

If there's enough interest, I'll make it available to download. Right now it's a little too customized and specific for just the way I likes it. I'd need to make a couple of tweaks to have it work with standard graffiti widgets, and that leads to whole hosts of possible layout issues.

Down in the mouth

simon — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 21:56:00 GMT

Had seven freakin’ hours of fairly intrusive dental surgery last week. This unhappy state of affairs is mostly due to botched root canal work a while back by some complete hack who shall remain both nameless and grateful that I’m not litigious.

watch the video

The surgery itself went well, but bloody hell, I don’t tolerate general anesthesia worth a damn.

It’s been a while since I had any, best part of twenty years, and that can’t have been anything on the same timeframe as this. I came out of the procedure projectile vomiting with a frenzy that’d put Linda Blair to shame, and just couldn’t stop. So the good medical folkery treated me to a cocktail of anti-nausea drugs, both IV’d and inserted in every orifice except my ears - eventually brought this under control enough to switch beds and pass out for a few more hours. But heaven knows the amount of sedative chemicalery that’s been foisted on my poor little hothouse flower of a system. For several days since, I’ve been moping around feeling a dreadful hungover malaise. It reminds me of the aftermath of some of the worst excesses of my twenties, but, most unfairly, without an actual evening worth remembering. The word poisoned comes to mind; it’s like I went on a week-long bender with Charles Bukowski and ended up drinking paint thinner and gasoline in a dumpster. Just fucking dreadful.

Teamed with a throbbing but hopefully healing mouth, not the most comfortable week I’ve ever had.

One Year

simon — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 17:43:00 GMT

Woo hoo! The previous entry is dated February 27th, 2006. A whole year without a blog post.

Actually, that's a little disingenuous; I have blogged intermittently at both http://blog.primecondition.com and http://blogs.interfacett.com/simon. And there was at least an original intention behind having the different places to blog: I thought I'd blog about personal stuff here, about prime at primecondition.com, and blog about technical things at interfacett.com. But the issue, of course, is that life ain't so cut-and-dried as that. What about a blog that's both technical and about prime? What about (as so many of my thoughts are) personal and technical? And the end result: if I'm immediately unsure of the right place to blog, I don't blog anywhere.

Oh well. It's not that the world hangs on my every word. But it seems I'll have to do a wee bit of clarity-slash-reinvention. I can think of a few folks that both reinvented way more successful blog content (http://www.megnut.com) or reworked their blog addresses to some other location ( http://www.carsonified.com) to change/refocus what they wanted to blog about. I feel the same thing coming on. Watch this space.

For a year, anyway.

PrimeCondition.com

simon — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 03:27:00 GMT

So I, along with a few other folks, have been working on a web app for quite some time now, and we decided to do the cliched thing and decloak out of stealth mode to (a) be finally upfront about what we've been doing and (b) allow people to signup if they're interested in the upcoming beta.

The site is www.primecondition.com. You use it to create custom audio exercise programs. Just build a workout the same way you might plan one on paper - enter your desired exercises, available equipment, your desired time, intensity and so on, and it combines custom music, sound effects / textures and voiceovers to build a set of completely personalized MP3 tracks you then download to your iPod (or whatever your mp3 weapon of choice is).

The custom audio has been great to play with. It's designed to match the timing to your speed - for example, lifting weights in a 2-seconds-up/2-seconds-down cadence, to make a routine easier. Or switching from a 5-minutes-slow, 5 minutes fast BPM speed if you're doing interval training. On a geek note I love working with audio in both a creative and technical sense - I used to write soundtracks for video games back in the early 90's and it's been great to get back into it again. We'll be going live with three genres of music, all mostly percussion-oriented: Cinematic (think movie trailer, Hans Zimmer-style), Edge (hard guitar, drums and industrial beats) and Tribal (world percussion). So many exercise products are so very middle-of-the-road when it comes to music. This one won't be.

There are obviously a bunch of features built around this core functionality, such as reporting and tracking (so you can figure out if something's actually working or not); you can rate and edit workouts, join and start groups, etc. but we're doing our best to not make this a “typical“ fitness product. First off, we're not “those” kind of people - I was interested in building this thing precisely because I'm not some steroided genetically gifted freakazoid whose sole existence is based around the gym, and to be honest I'm sick of the whole “fitness industry“ snake oil and the assumption that you need to pay $75/hour to some dimwit to be told how to do a pushup.

I know what I need to do; I think most people do. I just needed a way to make it part of my life. Most of the motivation for creating this was to have a fun and useful way to structure it, to be accountable, to progress and to be able to stick to it. (For example, one of the features is your own custom podcast feed, so that you can automatically have your next workout downloaded to your device).

There are sites where a good use of tech can make your life easier. Hopefully this will workout to be one of them.

Ah, it's nice to be finally be open about it, I've been working on the darn thing in various incarnations for a couple of years now. Take a look!

There's Two Sides to Every Story

simon — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 20:08:00 GMT

(Another suitor writes in response to a .NET Love Story Continues)

I'm so glad you Split from that Builder. He's not a good enough Provider, just a BackgroundWorker in a Factory. You told me yourself he wasn't a good Listener and treated you like an Object. Even though you would Try and Try again, you were never Fully Trusted. Is it any wonder your Expression seemed so Remote?

Well now you decided to Break it off and Switch I'm here to Catch you and Finally you can feel Protected and be with someone who appreciates your UniqueIdentity.

If you need a Memento of your Relationship, go ahead. Though i don't see why you'd even want a Trace of it. So we disagree there, but that's the Exception. Our passion remains Unchecked. Nothing is Comparable to you, and if you left no-one would be able to Console me.

Sometimes our Relationship is Volatile, because I'm Private and very Internal, whereas you're Explicit and when we're Tightly Coupling you like to be Bound.

Remember that time you wanted to Double and brought your Friend and all that SOAP? That Process was quite an Event! I first thought you wanted her to be an Observer, but no! What a Twisted Pair you were! I was quite surprised when she started Sniffing my Packet. And some of her plugins - Hello, World!

It's definitely the Case that I have to be more Agile with you two. That's Crystal Clear to me! (What was her name again? I'm OutOfMemory.)

I am honored to accept your rice

simon — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 13:48:00 GMT

Some time ago, the vagaries of personalization were examined in a whole spate of articles best characterized by one in the Wall Street Journal called “My Tivo Thinks I’m Gay”, talking about the amusing (or annoying) results of an out-of-context single choice leading to strange automated recommendations from collaborative filtering systems.

Now, I’m typically a fan of Amazon.com’s recommendation system, but most of us have experienced its quirks: you buy a gift for a friend’s new baby, and the next time you visit amazon; the entire home page is baby-oriented. That’s a litle amusing as long as they knock it off within a few days.

So recently I purchased a Zojirushi “fuzzy logic” rice cooker. The thing is awesome in a Hello-Kitty-meets-The-Matrix kind of way:

And next time I’m at amazon, it recommends four more high-end rice cookers. Now, I understand that buying books, DVDs or CDs is somewhat of a recurring purchase for most people, but I don’t need another $200+ rice cooker. I’ve got one. You’d think there’d be a simple MostPeopleDontNeedMoreThanOneOfThese flag in the database somewhere.

But I love my Zo’. It being 2006 and me still being somewhat annoyed that the world doesn’t contain the jetpacks and flying cars I was promised as a youngster, at least I can get a frisson of pleasure from having a kitchen device with the words “NEURO FUZZY” emblazoned on it. It makes fantastic sushi rice (and even has a “porridge” mode which pleases my Scottish self) and the “user experience” is wonderful in a quirky Japanese way: I picture the conference at Zojirushi headquarters as follows:

First Japanese: What should it do when you press the “cook” button?
(silence and much solemn thinking)
Second Japanese: It should play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”
First Japanese (bowing). Ah. But of course.
Second Japanese: We also need a picture of an elephant.

Next stop, one of those Toto Washlet thousand-dollar toilet seats.

And while we’re on the subject of odd eastern wordage, I was browsing the web site for the great Korean web design magazine Impress and I couldn’t help but be a little amused by their icon for obtaining the Acrobat reader – and no, I’m not making this up…

Hey, You Can Really See The Pockmarks On That Skank

simon — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 17:55:00 GMT

Had a week in Las Vegas last week teaching ASP.NET 2.0.

I don’t gamble. It’s not from any particular moral objection: people should be able to go to hell any way they want to. I just find it a ridiculous pursuit – as the saying goes, a tax on people who don’t understand math. I wander through a casino full of gambling folks and it strikes me as a bizarre spectacle - like I were watching a room full of people punch themselves repeatedly in the face.

(I realize this is a minority viewpoint.)

I was there for a week, so my wife came with me; she was working on edits for her latest book. We stayed the Venetian for a few nights and then checked in to the brand-new Wynn Resort, as I was curious to see what techno-goodies they were reputed to have spent three billion dollars on.

It’s an amazing hotel, but they’ve only been open for a few weeks, and it shows. They’re still working out the bugs. Computers had crashed when we arrived, so we were checked in to this technological showcase with paper and those old hand-driven credit card imprint machines, which half the staff weren’t quite sure how to use.

But the rooms are great, wonderful minimalist decor, great lighting schemes and lots of toys: VoIP phones, radio with an extension cord to plug in your iPod, remote control powered drapes. The fastest internet connection I’ve ever had. And flat-screen LCD HDTVs in all the rooms (including the bathroom), but the odd thing was this: the only HD movies you could purchase were porno movies.

Now, I’m fairly libertarian in my leanings; I don’t find pr0n particularly objectionable. It just surprised me that the showcase for this new technology was hi-def skin flicks. I guess it’s just another example of all major technological advances being not-so-secretly driven by porn.

It's Like Strunk and White Had Never Been Born

simon — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 01:27:00 GMT

I’m working my way through some Microsoft Official Courseware this evening to prepare for an upcoming course, and I’m just despairing at the long-winded, content-free garbage I’m so often saddled with when teaching the official curriculum. Here’s a direct cut-and-paste from a section on .NET remoting:

When a client requests for a remote object on the Application server, the Web server first authenticates the client’s identity. After confirming the identity, the Web server uses the client’s identity to request the Application server for the remote object on behalf of the client. The Application server then confirms the identity of the Web server, which is the identity of the client. After confirming the identity of the Web server, the Application server provides access to the remote object. In this model, the Web server impersonates as the client and requests the Application server for the remote object. As a result, the model is called the impersonation model. In the impersonation model, the Web server executes the client request on the Application server on behalf of the client.

To get the true periphrastic awfulness of it, read it out loud. This is supposed to teach you something?

I guess this will be yet another course where my job as an instructor is to rescue the students from the courseware; to machete a path through the verbosity to hopefully reach what it actually means and why should you give a damn.

If only I could lock all these folks in a room and make ‘em read Joel Spolsky or Philip Greenspun till they see the error of their ways.

On that serendipitous note, I see Joel’s just come out with The Best Software Writing I which I’ll have to AmazonPrime into my eager hands this week.