A bullet-proof plan to ensure those IT people passing you in the corridor are laughing at you, not with you:

1. Hold large meeting
2. Invite IT people
3. Begin spittle-flecked rant
4. Insinuate IT people are overpaid
5. Use the word “Logarithm” in the place of “Algorithm”
6. Do it again
7. And again
8. Now storm out

Brilliant, you’re well on your way!

Posted in Tech on Thursday May 8, 2008. Shoutouts.

Fake Steve on Facebook:

Kids, let’s face it. Facebook is Webkinz for adults. Facebook is a Ponzi scheme. A handful of VCs have created the illusion of an actual market by funding apps companies and then doing deals with each other — passing cash back and forth among to make it look as if money is being made.

Funwall anyone?

Posted in Tech on Saturday May 3, 2008. Shoutouts.

This weekend I’ve promised myself I’ll fix three years of neglect to the blogging backend that powers Tin Ear. Initially, I will probably more break things than I fix. If you turn up and the lights are out, someone’s drunk all the beer and the doorbell isn’t working, you’ll know who to blame. Who? I can think of no better candidate than Peter Cavelevic.

Posted in Tech on Saturday April 5, 2008. Shoutouts.

I’ve been reading a lot about the concept of a technological singularity recently. This is an idea that, while I had come across it fairly frequently in fiction, was not something I had translated to the real-world. It still seems enormously sci-fi:

A future that contains smarter-than-human minds is genuinely different in a way that goes beyond the usual visions of a future filled with bigger and better gadgets. Vernor Vinge originally coined the term “Singularity” in observing that, just as our model of physics breaks down when it tries to model the singularity at the center of a black hole, our model of the world breaks down when it tries to model a future that contains entities smarter than human.

Some poking around turns up the fact that there’s an institute devoted to it, several foundations writing about it and even people popping pills to prepare for it.

So, what will having smarter than human masters allow us to do? Catch rabies and die, apparently.

Posted in Tech on Monday March 31, 2008. Shoutouts.

Nerdfilter: Fascinating interview by Fred Vogelstein with Google CEO Eric Schmidt about management, the wisdom of crowds and growing the googleplex.

Posted in Tech on Monday April 16, 2007. Shoutouts.

I’ve railed on about Apple’s marketing on here before. Many times. If that type of thing doesn’t float your boat, you may want to skip on down. Aaaanyway, you know those Apple vs. PC ads they put out last year. The one with the trendy, hip “Apple” that you wanted to slap in the face. I hated them. I fell squarely into the target demographic and yet after I watched them I ended up with a sour taste in my mouth. They ended up making me want to buy a Mac less, not more. Buh? Then I read Seth Stevenson’s piece on Slate that said everything I had been thinking, but better:

My problem with these ads begins with the casting. As the Mac character, Justin Long (who was in the forgettable movie Dodgeball and the forgettabler TV show Ed) is just the sort of unshaven, hoodie-wearing, hands-in-pockets hipster we’ve always imagined when picturing a Mac enthusiast. He’s perfect. Too perfect. It’s like Apple is parodying its own image while also cementing it.

Get to the point, Dan. Get to the point. Well, Apple have just launched the same campaign in Japan and they have completely and utterly nailed it. They’re hilarious, even if you don’t understand Japanese. Check the third one along if you doubt it.

I think it’s amusing looking at how this contrasts to the campaign we saw in the West. The most immediately apparent difference is that the two Japanese characters are about the same age and physical build. You could swap their clothes and roles and the commercial would work equally well. The “Apple” guy is cool, but not too cool. He looks like he’s just got home from the office and slipped into something more comfortable. Neither is he condescending. The PC guy isn’t billed as old and boring, but rather as too business-like and a little out of touch. The first ad pretty much goes on about how people call the Mac, “Mac” but PC’s don’t have a special name. The Mac suggests that maybe “Work” is a good idea, y’know, because of all the business stuff and all.

And there’s the distinction. In the West, Apple are pushing the Mac platform as a safer, easier and funkier alternative to the has-been, unsafe, boring old PC, whereas in Japan it seems to be a more a case of “Hey, leave the business at the workplace and come home to your Mac. We’ve got photos.”

But, at the end of the day, I still have a sneaking suspicion that I’d rather get drunk with the salaryman that’s got an iPod full of Eurobeat and is trying to dance on the table but his glasses keep on falling off and why is his tie tucked into his shirt, and oh man, now he’s hugging me?!

Posted in Tech on Monday November 13, 2006. Shoutouts [1].

Multi-Touch Interaction Research means getting a rear-projected drafting table that functions as a touch-driven computer screen and then playing around with it. Expect “Interface-free” to become a much, much bigger deal as devices like this become ubiquitous.

It’s a while off yet, though, and the one time I’ve seen anything remotely as sophisticated as this in daily use was at the Kobe Earthquake Memorial Museum, where they had some huge flat-screen displays that were fully touch sensitivity displaying a satellite map of Kobe. It’s amazing just how intuitive the interface to control the map at the Museum, or the more complex three dimensional one shown in the first video is. As it’s so similar to manipulating the familiar, real-world, counterpart, you forget to even look for an interface and instead begin to interact with the display directly, and it behaves the way you expect it should.

Isn’t it time we abandoned the twenty-year-old desktop and filing-cabinet metaphors for personal computing and started moving towards something a little more all-inclusive?

Over the past few years, I’ve seen plenty of interface suggestions that build in a third dimension and on the whole, they’re rubbish. Being able to stack files in 3D and then sort them into piles doesn’t help the user at all: it’s more needless clutter and more forced metaphor to learn. New users shouldn’t have to be taught the mouse movements necessary to lasso files into groups and stack them orderly. The way forward is removing the interface altogether and using metadata and search intelligently.

If you’re on a Mac, you probably already have Quicksilver installed. If you don’t, do. If you’re on a PC the bastard step-child is Launchy and while it’s nowhere near as powerful or extensible as Quicksilver it proves the concept.

Which concept?

That we do not need an interface forced upon us in order to access, most efficiently, the majority of the most frequently used computing functions. The interface should be invisible. As the Quicksilver documentation points out, the process should be invisible and second-nature, leaving only the results.

What we need to move forward is learning tools. What we need is universal search. What we need is decentralized data storage. What we need is intelligent, and automated, tagging. We we need is software that gets the hell out of our way and lets us do what we want to do. And what we want to do is not to spend our time struggling with software, interface, or the newest iteration of the window metaphor, it is to spend that time creating.

Posted in Tech on Wednesday November 1, 2006. Shoutouts.

Google’s new for-profit philathropic arm, Google.org, is run by a guy called Dr. Brilliant. Seriously, how can it fail? Just imagine the meetings:

Next up is our plan to supply water to western Kenya. I’d like call upon our executive director, Dr. Brilliant, to say a few words. Doctor?

It doesn’t matter what he says now. He’s a doctor. He’s brilliant. He is Dr. Brilliant. He could talk about desexing flamingoes for all I care, I’m already sold.

The NYT has a story on Google.org if you’re intrested in more. Brilliant.

Posted in Tech on Friday September 15, 2006. Shoutouts.

iTunes 7 or, “Huzzah, my obsessive-compulsive nerlish desire to put cover-art on albums has finally paid off, let me flick through the entirely useless UI until I can find an album to click on. Oooh, pictures.”

Also, Dear Vic on the Macalope is some first-class journalistic destruction.

Oooh, pictures.

Posted in Tech on Friday September 15, 2006. Shoutouts.

There’s a new reading list on the right, updated daily, with some of the choicest stuff I come across as I stumble blindly around the web, waving my arms in front of me and mewing frantically. For those of you reading via rss, or people on textplanet, I suggest you don’t click here, but rather go and look at the angry red pig encrusted in jewlery. Snoogans.

Posted in Tech on Thursday June 1, 2006. Shoutouts.