Month: November 2003

Cousins were over for casual pizza dinner tonight, and I sent the boy into the living room to ask his uncle whether he would like a Sam Adams or a Hefeweizen. He got the whole question out wonderfully, and returned to me in the kitchen with a coherent answer (the latter). I handed him the correct bottle, and he delivered it with aplomb (two hands, no running). Is this why you have children? One of the reasons. ;-p

On Wednesday, I went to see Master and Commander, The Far Side of the World (warning: this website brought my computer to its knees… is Flash the culprit?), the first movie made using the Aubrey-Maturin characters from Patrick O’Brian. I read Master and Commander long before I started writing here; here are my notes on The Far Side of the World. Since the title derives from the first and the tenth in the 20-volume series, I was curious to see how the melange would come to life.

The movie’s plot pulls more from the tenth book, although I felt like various incidents were plucked from the intervening novels (but too hard for me to check). Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are clearly well acquainted in the film, and the naturalist instincts of Dr. Maturin are a known quantity amongst all HMS Surprise’s crew. I found the movie well done, but not compelling. With O’Brian, so often the anticipation of action or discussion of strategy demands more attention than any battle ever does. In that way, the books feel true to the pace of life. The movie did not ignore that in-between time, to the director’s credit. There are various interludes which, taken as a whole, probably fill the movie more than the three encounters with the French privateer which ostensibly drive the plot. The action, however bloody and true-to-life, is just more bang and crash. And bang and crash in this day and age is a losing measure… what does the 18th century have to counter Terminator, et al? That said, the personal details (an amputation of a young teen officer’s arm, the sewing of sailcloth around corpses, and the like) did bring the brutish nature of the time and the Royal Navy more to life than anything else.

I hope the movie does well at the box office, enough so that another installment is forthcoming. The ending left all possibilities open, of course. I didn’t love the movie, but I’m glad someone is trying.

Rajesh Jain at Emergic cites a NYTimes article about the sudden interest in Friendster and other community sites (yes, we’ve been down this road before… anyone remember SixDegrees and TheGlobe?). From the article:

When two people greet each other on the street, neither can see (nor hope to grasp) the range of the other’s social network. For that matter, no individual can see information about his or her own social network: who knows whom, and how. Friendster offers a mix of architecture-changing tools and technologies: e-mail, a profile (which offers a persistent presentation of self) and a coarse representation of a social network.

Jain doesn’t call it out here, but I think the elusive chimera here is how to represent and display depth. For a news website (say, News.com), you view one story at a time, but there are tens of thousands of articles from 1996 through 2003. How, from that one story, do you get a sense of the authority that depth of coverage can convey? (Hint: the NYTimes has the same problem, which explains why brands do matter.) A millisecond glance at a book tells you how deeply it attempts to cover a subject, but a website is worse even than a newspaper or magazine in its difficulty in expressing its place in the tapestry of information. Friendster and LinkedIn and these other social networking sites are trying to draw the (ever-shifting) map of ‘alliances’ between and among people. This depth is false and illusory, but that the space is even being mined is fascinating. Still not a business (despite the influx of funds), but fascinating.

New version of MacOS X, Panther (aka 10.3), is now running on the desktop as well as the laptop. I wasn’t in a hurry, until my sister bought an iSight in the Burlingame Apple Store yesterday. We wanted to test iChatAV between the laptop and the desktop, so that set off an afternoon of backing up, both to CDs and the external FireWire hard drive. Fortunately, those backups appear unnecessary for the moment… especially fortunate because it’s unclear whether or not the FireWire hard drive problems that have been cited by many, and acknowledged by Apple, are limited to FireWire 800 or 400 drives. Apple only owned up to the 800 drives, and my external is a FireWire 400, so less reason to be concerned. But data is data.

Anyway, I’m checking all the various applications, and things appear to be in good shape, via the Archive & Install upgrade method. I did appreciate the peace of mind offered by Take Control of Upgrading to Panther, the $5 e-book from the publishers of TidBITS.

Of course, the catalyst for the install still hasn’t worked fully… the iSight works beautifully, but using our FireWire DV camera, a Canon, isn’t yet giving us video, although the audio is definitely functional. Hmmm… let me know if you have any tips/URLs to consider. I’ll be muddling through today.

Several made the trip out here, and talked to several more throughout the day. Turkey is still in the oven, but we’re enjoying ourselves. Had a nice surprise this morning when we went on a walk in Golden Gate Park, and found the Conservatory of Flowers open and uncrowded. It re-opened a couple of months ago after being closed since 1995 due to windstorm damage and fundraising delays. I’m not a big flora fan, but interesting all the same, and the current exhibit of butterflies was a big hit with the boy.

A bit slow, but interesting: Search Engine Decoder. [via Emergic]

I just reviewed an illuminating re-think of mapping the California recall votes, thanks to a pointer from Jeffrey Veen. Wow. You can really lie better with pictures than numbers, if you want to. I visited the Exploratorium here in San Francisco yesterday, and smiled my way through various hands-on and eyes-on exhibits, several of which pointed out the way our expectations color (literally and otherwise) our vision. I currently have EarthDesk set to display the Miller projection on the desktop map of the world, so I’m aware of some of the tradeoffs in displaying information, but this look at the recall vote, and the ways in which lazy choices can influence the understanding of information is dramatic. I don’t have the skills or the tools to experiment in this field, but fascinating all the same.

Just read this IBM developerWorks article about the poor state of documentation. Fair enough, but whining about it without providing more specific examples, for real-world products, isn’t tremendously helpful. (I rarely write documentation, but I have done some for internal tools.) The only tip to improve the process was on indexing.

Want to make a good index? Ask people to look things up in it, but require them to write down the words they think of before they look in the index. Now make sure all those words are in your index. You’ll be stunned at the gaps this uncovers.

Bookmarked this NYTimes.com article on the digital home and its discontents several days ago. Written by James Gleick, whom I’ve read regularly, this essay points out that our implementation of technology in the home is ahead of the maturation necessary to make the technologies used invisible. Plug and play? No way.

Once you’ve entered the future, be prepared for a double-edged question: Is your house smarter than you are? You’re likely to hear it from your spouse, who just wants to watch TV, while you struggle with the combined TiVo-DVD-satellite remote control.

I’ve been there, with the TiVo, and I still have printed-out instructions from the TiVo website about how I might be able to use a splitter to watch some shows at the same time as we record something else. But I’m reluctant to take the plunge, after the recent Comcast debacles. Gleick goes on:

It falls to the homeowner to serve as local information-technology manager. After all, with power comes responsibility. Someone must take charge of operating these new and complex devices, not to mention the programming and systems design. The homeowner spends increasing time alone in an important new room, a room off-limits to some members of the household: the wiring closet. User manuals proliferate. Sometimes it is even necessary to read them — necessary, but not sufficient.

We (well, not me) are very good about keeping and organizing all our manuals. I do read many of them, for the technical equipment. The experience doesn’t leave me feeling informed and educated. May I blame the manuals?

But how many individual remote controls can one person want? Generally, the answer is one. So we need one more smart helpmeet: the programmable remote, a computer in itself, with hard and ”soft” buttons and scroll wheels and touchscreens and trackballs. And very large manuals.

We haven’t taken that plunge, as we attempt to use only the TiVo remote. For most things, it suffices… and that’s good enough.

Our technolust and Luddite impulses have rarely been so provoked — and at the same time and in the same people. Workplaces and cars have plenty of resonance, but the home is special: hearth, womb — place of succor, not bewilderment. So Smart Houses cause both stress and exhilaration, and the emotions are hard to separate. ”For those of us who don’t want to have any part in restructuring our lives, it’s daunting,” says a New York psychotherapist whose home I.T. manager is his wife.

I’m the tech geek in the family, and the AV system challenges my geek cred every day. I’ll just try and upgrade the computers to MacOS X 10.3 (laptop done, smoothly… desktop, waiting to back all the data up first).

I’ve been reading five daily comic strips using NetNewsWire, via RSS feeds from Tapestry. This morning, I learned about iComic, a dedicated application just for comic strips. I’m guessing it works much the same way, but maybe I’ll try it out. I am not a big fan of the San Francisco Chronicle Datebook section. Without the comics, there is even less reason to open that section of the paper. I do wonder how long before the comic strip creators, or their syndicators, block this type of usage, though.