Virtual Thought

Right now, to control my TV, DVD player, VCR, cable box and TV I use the Remote Commander. It’s great and all, but it doesn’t have a good sense of workflow. It offers tons of customization, is programmable against any other remote there is, and helped me consolidate my five remote controls into one unit.

It didn’t solve the main problem with componentized systems, though: the user still needs to know to set the amplifier to DVD, make sure the TV is on, make sure the TV is set to line input instead of channel input, turn on the DVD player… into this bleak user experience, enter the Logitech Harmony. This control is USB programmable and, even better, remembers the state of each component in the system. Rather than entering a macro that assumes that your system is in one state and must transition to another, this remote control remembers what state every component is in and transitions it to a point where it can accomplish certain tasks, like “Play a Movie” or “Listen to Music”, all with one button press. Beautiful!

I see a similar progression in software. As more and more options become available (because customization is key) the system becomes too complex to effectively wield anymore. Options and customizations are great, but we need a better sense of workflow.

For instance, in the great P2P program eMule, the user is trying to download something from a P2P network. That is their goal. What is their workflow? They must connect, succeed in connecting, possibly download a new version of eMule itself and install that, possibly download a new server list, then go to the search page, then type in what they want and finally select what form they want it to be in (Documents, Music, Software… would my mom know the difference?). After all that, when the user presses “Search” a (hopefully) lengthy list of cryptic filenames lists out… double-clicking on of these turns it red so that you can go to the Transfers window to see that it is, indeed, transferring. When it is done, double-clicking the transferred file does nothing. To open the directory that the file is in you must click another button on the toolbar.

Isn’t there a way to simplify all that?

I have this vision of a software layer on top of the Windows OS that provides to application developers the means to quickly develop easy-to-use, customizable, workflow-oriented programs that have a minimum of fuss. In studying UI paradigms (of which computers as file cabinets is becoming very, very old) it seems like users are ready to move away from a strictly physical interpretation of a computer screen and are ready to be exposed to just a little more depth. I think it’s wrong to express that depth in a blistering array of menu choices, buttons and other so-called “hot” locations where a mouse click produces an action… if we know what the user wants to do we should commit ourselves as developers to helping them do that thing. If our program doesn’t quite capture the workflow adequately then maybe we need to study the market more before we release.

This is all just a rehash of the “making the user save something they’ve been typing for three hours doesn’t make sense” soapbox. Why force the user to do some arbitrary step that we chose to call “Save” when they want to preserve their work? Chances are they want to preserve their work, so why are we making them tell us? Microsoft OneNote does an excellent job at capturing the feel of a paper noteboox: I never have to hit “Save”, I can write anywhere I want to, I can organize things any way I wish, I can paste a snapshot of anything on my desktop, I can embed sound and movie files… all seamlessly, all with the same UI paradigm of, basically, making a scrapbook. Try it out, it’s great.

Meanwhile, I’m gonna get myself one of those Harmony remotes.

MooKitty’s blog has this fantastic WordPress plug-in called Spamminator. It just frickin’ rocks.

I popped in the little .php file, marked a couple of my comment-spammer’s spam as “spam”, and voila! They are now instantly deleted. I’ve watched the e-mail notifications that Spamminator has been sending me and it hasn’t had a false positive yet. My comment spam problem is solved!

My friends Nick and Jim are tremendous Tolkien fans. They’ve read the appendices, they know their genealogies… I only read “The Lord of the Rings” before the movies came out (and just in time), though I know that Tolkien has colored every fantasy novel and RPG ever, many of which I’ve participated in gladly.

My Tolkien is Ursula K. LeGuin. My “Lord of the Rings” are the Earthsea books. Because of these books, my number one career choice was wizard. Because of these books, my whole philosophy of life was made to grow and expand. These books fundamentally altered the fabric of my being. They are immeasurably important to me.

And now SciFi is going to screw them up.

In a statement on her personal website, Mrs. LeGuin has admitted that she was never consulted on the miniseries that starts in early December and that she fundamentally disagrees with the direction the director is taking the series. Dammit.

As these forum posts illustrate, the many fans of Mrs. LeGuin’s work are equally as outraged as I am. It was too much to hope, especially after reading Mrs. LeGuin’s initial comments, that this miniseries would be good. And now, I know, this travesty will be just that: a travesty.

Dammit dammit dammit. Oh well.

Just as a sad side note to the tale, here’s what I dislike about the miniseries based just on the teasers and trailers:

• Only the Kargs in Earthsea are pale-skinned. All other people in the Archipelago are red-brown. The only actor of color that seems to be involved in the production is Danny Glover who plays Ogion.


• The shadow that Ged chases throughout the first third of the series is just that, a shadow, which is metaphorically significant. Apparently it has been replaced by some Gollum-like beast.


• Tenar and Ged were not romantically involved until Tehanu, and even then there was no grand unifying sappiness about their love. The stories are not about love as a unifying force but are mostly about self-discovery and personal growth and learning a sense of balance about one’s life.


• In his first confrontantion with the shadow, the gebbeth, Ged is raked by its talons down the side of his face. Again, this is metaphorically significant because his outward appearance is marred by his search to unite his divided self. However, that is left off the series as well.


• There is a character that is credited on the IMDB.com listing as “King Tygath”. There is no king in Havnor since the Rune of Peace was lost with the Ring of Erreth-Ekbe, so I am assuming that this king is the Godking of the Karego-at whose name, as far as I know, is never mentioned by name in the books and is, at best, a secondary character. The fact that he is now a named character suggests that the series is going in an unexpected and, simply, a wrong direction.

They’re back. And, for some reason, they prefer to talk about serializing game data.

I’m getting comment spammed BAD. WordPress is cool enough to catch it in its spam filter and ask me if I want to authorize it, but whew! It’s at least five a day now… and about 80% of them are on that entry.

As an experiment, I’ve added a comment to that post. Let’s see if that’s any deterrent.

An essay forwarded to me by my Mom: The Optimism of Uncertainty

This article is pretty much exactly what my guiding principles are/were on a new venture that I’m starting soon… just get your revolution boots ready. ( =

Found a great blog called Marginal Revolution on my friend Mark’s blog. I’ve been meaning to link to them for a while, so surely the article I mention below isn’t prominent anymore.

However, the blog above led me to this article at the New York Times about Bush’s faith-based presidency. Apparently, whether conciously or not, Bush has created an administration that is fearful of questioning its leader, where facts are distorted through a lens of stubbornness and a strong will to not know the truth.

I try to carefully consider my position on most issues and this used to cause me grief that I didn’t have strong opinions about things at my beck and call. I no longer worry about that; a careful consideration of an issue leads to a deeper understanding of that issue, the world at large and me in particular. In turn, this leads to a deeper spiritual growth. Shout it out, Emmerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Here comes the cyberpunk revolution: NJIT has received a grant for smartguns that will be available in 2006. These guns will only fire for users which they recognize through some sort of biometrics that aren’t specified in the article. As an added bonus, they are considering adding a form of electrical ignition of the bullet so that it is easy to change calibers on the gun without buying a whole new gun or reboring the barrel or any of those other messy operations.

When the gun starts linking up to a headset that recognizes friend from foe and won’t shoot when pointed at a friend, I’ll get one. And I’ll take the neural inductive link to my computer as well.