The thing that has always amused me about the robot apocalypse

Isn't it funny that we always seem to be happy to create the tools of our own destruction?






I wonder if this guy realizes the Pandora's Box he has opened?  Surely someone else would come along and open it later, if he didn't do it now.  But it's still very creepy how we pretend that all progress is good progress.

Clearly the world would be better off if no one ever solved this particular software puzzle.  But there is no way for us to all agree to not do it, so someone is bound to do it.  I think that this particular economic problem--the lack of a system for agreeing to not do something--will be the great Achilles heel of humanity.  The last words of our species will be, "I wish we could have come up with a way to agree to not do that."

This is what YouTube is for

Problems with my tires forced me to replace my shocks and struts yesterday.

My car has 100k miles.  The fuel filter has never been changed.  It idles low and rough, and has been losing power.  So it was time to change it.  The shop where I had my oil changed wanted $30 for the filter and $50 for the labor.

I bought a new fuel filter for $8.  After I had the rear shocks replaced I tried to pull off the old filter.  I have the Haynes repair manual that has step-by-step for stuff like this, and I followed the steps.  I fought with it for half an hour and couldn't get it disconnected.

This morning I googled it and found this YouTube video:




The voice is monotone.  But the instructions are better than the stupid Haynes manual because this guy shows the critically important fuel line disconnect tool!?!?!?!?  I can't believe that the Haynes manual missed this.

That tool is $5 at the local part store, and they have it in stock.

The shop wanted $1300 to do the shocks and struts, and $80 to do the fuel filter.  I'm going to have both done for $300 and about 5-6 hours.

3d modeling in the near future

Microsoft provides an open interface for Kinect, which lets hackers use the Kinect camera for whatever crazy projects they can come up with.

This video is a little technical, but even non-technical folks should be able to follow the amazing new user interface.




I would expect to see more refined versions of this commercially available within the next two years.  3d CGI will faster, easier, better looking, and more accessible to amateurs.

Hopefully Microsoft will learn something from this project and open the interface for more projects.

Netflix feature requests and parental controls

We get Netflix now.  The kids are loving Netflix streaming on the Wii.  We haven't watched as many big people movies as I had expected.  But, overall, it is a neat service.  And the value per entertainment dollar spent is fantastic.

But I'm a software guy.  And Netflix is a software service.  So, of course, I have ideas on how to improve it.

I've scoured Netflix's website and I cannot find any way to submit a feature request or give unstructured feedback.  This is a mistake, both for their business model and the software itself.  Companies today have to engage clients and digest the feedback.  They have a blog, and comments are allowed.  But there is no way to contact anyone directly or engage with the company.

I'll link this blog post in the comments of their latest blog posts.  I'm also going to post it on their wall on Facebook.  But I doubt it will get noticed.

With that all said, I've got two feature requests/suggestions for Netflix.

1. A General Feedback Mechanism
Duh!  There are thousands of users out there who have ideas they would like to share.  Just listening to their ideas makes your brand more engaging and sticky.  Some percentage of those ideas are good or great.  Those ideas will genuinely make your service better.

As a baby-step you can just implement one of the general-purpose feedback websites, like Suggestionbox.com.  (Suggestionbox created that site for them as a teaser to try to engage Netflix.  Netflix isn't actively using it yet.  I have no affiliation with Suggestionbox.)

But you already have a platform where you are engaging with people.  So I would suggest that you build a 'Netflix feature queue' right into your service.  Give people the ability to write up feature requests (like this one) and place them in the queue.  Let others read and prioritize those features.  I'm sure that you have an agile development team (or three).  Put their scrum backlog in there and let clients interact with it.

You will have to moderate the content, obviously.  You will have tons of 'I got a DVD of Teen Wolf 2 that was scratched.'  Some of your customer service people will have to review every incoming post and filter out the stuff that doesn't fit.  And they will have to merge similar requests.

But when you build a feature that was customer-designed you should scream it from the rooftops.  Send someone out to get a picture of the person who wrote up the idea.  Give them a free month of service and a shirt.


2. Granular Parental Controls
I haven't seen anything from Netflix that suggests they want people to sign up for more than one account per household.  That means parents and children are sharing queues and streaming devices.  We have 4 kids--a large-ish family by modern American standards.  But I would suggest that our usage patterns are probably fairly typical.

In our house this means that the 'Suggested for Randy' queue is:
* Clifford
* Angelina Ballerina
* Se7en
* Salt
* Ben-10
* The Shawshank Redemption
* Blues Clues
* Dexter
* Cake Boss
* Shaun the Sheep
* The Blues Brothers
* Enter the Dragon
* Zombieland

This is disconcerting for me as a parent, because so many of my shows appear at the top of the queue when my kids are picking shows.  I don't need my kids watching even a few minutes of Se7en or Dexter while they know that I'm busy doing something else.

We have a Wii with Netflix streaming on our main TV.  We have Netflix streaming on the adult's computers, but we don't want to watch movies at our desks.  Everyone basically shares the main TV for Netflix.

We have 2 preschoolers (who can navigate the Netflix menu on the Wii and pick their shows.)  We have a 9 year old, a 13 year old, and two adults.  In a perfect world that's 5 separate instant queues on this device.  In reality, though, if each of the big kids got a personal queue then both of the little ones would demand their own queues, too.  So that's 6 separate instant queues on the Wii.

Each queue needs an optional password.

When I'm in a queue, I need to see the name of the queue at the top of the screen.  (On the Wii, the queues should each have a Mii.)

If I have several streaming devices (Wii, iPad, computer, streaming Blue-Ray player, etc.), then I should be able to pick which queues appear on which devices  The default should be for all queues to appear as options on all devices.  Some devices won't be able to handle multiple queues, especially at first, so they will have to default to just the first queue.

Each queue needs to have it's own settings for what's allowed.

There is a sticky problem on content that is not rated--old movies and TV shows.  So I would base the parental controls on a combination of Common Sense ratings and MPAA ratings.  And for the shows that are not rated by either service, I would control by genre.

So my parental control options would look like this:

---

Little Jenny's queue allows:
* All shows
* R and below
* PG-13 and below
* PG and below
* G and below

For shows that are not rated by the MPAA, allow:
* All shows
* Common Sense age 17 and below
* Common Sense age 14 and below
* Common Sense age 11 and below
* Common Sense age 8 and below
* Common Sense age 4 and below
* No shows not rated by the MPAA 

For shows that are not rated by the MPAA or Common Sense, allow:
# Action & Adventure
# Anime & Animation
# Children & Family
# Classics
# Comedy
# Documentary
# Drama
# Faith & Spirituality
# Foreign
# Gay & Lesbian
# Horror
# Independent
# Music & Musicals
# Romance
# Sci-Fi & Fantasy
# Special Interest
# Sports & Fitness
# Television
# Thrillers

---

For that last category the interface is checkboxes, not a single select.  A movie that is categorized as both 'Documentary' and 'Gay & Lesbian' would be blocked unless both categories are checked here.

Few parents are going to select 'Gay & Lesbian' or 'Horror', but the control settings should simply include all genres for simplicity's sake.  Any new genre that gets added to the system should show up here, and be unchecked for everyone who has already set up their parental controls.

Inception in C

I loved the movie Inception.  Someone loved it more than I did.

This person wrote a program that mimics the movie and implants the idea into Fischer.  I wish I could read C code.

Some people have action figures.  Some people have posters.  The Inception crew is now the first movie cast to be recreated as C code.

Misconceptions

XKCD is always brilliant.  Yesterday's is especially so.

The Wikipedia List of Common Misconceptions article is real, and quite well done.  It is the sort of thing that everyone ought to read through at least once a year.

Merry Christmas

Welcome to the future

Quest Visual has just released Word Lens, an iPhone application that will instantly translate anything that you can point your iPhone camera at.  Right now it is only Spanish-English and English-Spanish.  Signs, menus, whatever you happen to have around you.  You don't even have to take a picture--it translates in real-time while viewing whatever you point your phone at.

I understand how it all works.  But I was still surprised to see it happen this soon.  And the implementation is amazing.  You have to watch the video.

I would almost buy an iPhone, just to play with this.  But I'll wait for the Android version(s).  It can't take long.

Julian Assange

I've been quiet on this guy.  I've been busy working on other things.  I've read the headlines and the interview published recently.  I'm not going to rehash anything you've seen elsewhere.

I'm not including any links in this article because there are serious problems with the media coverage on this guy--more on that below.  Julian is the internet's first real lightning rod, and I'm afraid that he will soon be it's first martyr.

Julian's idea is that the powerful (people/companies/nations) are abusing those without power, and that he can end the abuse if he exposes enough of the powerfuls' secrets.

I heartily agree with him that the powerful are abusing the powerless.  I'm not sure if Julian understands that this has been going on since the dawn of civilization, and that the abuse is trending down.  I don't think he cares about that.  I think he is only fixated on the current situation--which is pretty good by historical standards, but still quite awful in absolute terms.

Exposing the deceits and deceptions of the powerful will definitely hurt them.  And since I am powerless, at some level I am inclined to cheer that.  But I do not follow the chain of logic from hurting the powerful to improving the lives of the powerless. In fact, I have grave doubts that hurting the powerful will accomplish anything useful.

For example, the US government is powerful.  The US government is an easy target for Julian because it employs so many potential whistle-blowers, and it contains many potentially embarrassing secrets.  The best result that Julian can hope for is the utter collapse of the US government.  That seems to be the limit of his vision.  But what will actually happen if the US government collapses?  Will the world be better or worse off?


Total collapse is unlikely, even though it seems to be Julian's ideal goal.  A more likely outcome is (a) a diminishing of the power of the US government, (b) some sort of reforms to how the US government wields (abuses) it's power, and (c) some serious improvements in the way that the powerful guard their secrets.  Will that actually benefit the powerless?  I say no, it won't.  I have two reasons for that opinion:
1. Diminishing the power of the US government leaves a power vacuum that will be filled by someone else.  All of the candidates for filling that power vacuum have much worse track records of abuse.
2. The power abuse reforms will probably remain limited to the US government, but the improvements in secret-keeping will accrue to all of the powerful.

If I thought his actions would achieve his intentions then I would join his team.  But I am convinced that his actions will result in the opposite of what he intends.  So I must oppose him.

Attacking the US government in this way challenges it to defend itself.  It will establish laws, treaties, and technologies to protect itself.  Those laws and treaties will, unfortunately, protect all of the other powerful also.  We're only seeing the beginning of that.  The trumped-up rape charges are a sham.  Hopefully some whistle-blower will expose that particular abuse of power soon.  But it doesn't really matter what they grabbed him for.  Now they have him.

I imagine that the CIA (with the cooperation of every security service in the western world) is hacking every part of Julian's life while he cools his heels in isolation.  They will have all of his secrets before they release him.  If they are as good as they advertise then they will find his poison pill and delete it.  I'm not sure if Julian adequately planned for that, but I expect that he did.  In fact, I expect that the security services are walking into a trap that will expose their illegal hacking of Julian's life.

This type of whistle-blowing is going to increase.  The internet just makes the free-flow of information too easy.  Most of the journalists in the mainstream media are crying in their drinks that they don't have Julian's cajones and data.  That's why the mainstream media has cooperated with him so far.  Expect the powers-that-be to get their ducks in a row and put an end to that soon.

This ideal of activism is exactly what sends most journalists into that profession in the first place.  Expect serious journalists to buck the new world order that is coming for them, and leave for independent pastures.  Even if they throw Julian into Guantanamo and delete all of the secret data he has, another Julian will rise up soon enough.  The whistle-blowers are clearly willing to dish their dirt.

Right now the best discussions of wikileaks are happening out on the fringes of the internet where polite society fears to look.  Those are sites that I will not link for various reasons.  But the biggest reason is that I expect the US government to soon go into full attack mode against anyone who keeps a copy of the leaked data.  I don't have a copy, and I won't link to it because getting caught up in that mess is counter to my future plans.

If there were some way that Julian could have attacked smaller targets first, and built up to the more powerful targets later, then that strategy would have been better.  But there was no way to establish his bona-fides and launch his project on small targets.  I expect the next Julians to start smaller.

My own strategy is to develop alternatives to the abuse of power.  Democracy 2.0 is all about reducing the powerfuls' abuse of power.  But I'm coming at the problem from the opposite direction.  I'm avoiding challenging the powerful directly.  I'm keeping the discussion as hypothetical as possible.  I'm idealistic instead of accusative.

I do hope that Julian survives and learns to improve his strategy.  But I don't expect him to.  I expect the powerful to kill him.  Power corrupts, after all.

Why you shouldn't become an archivist

This site, Xtranormal, has a software that will take your spoken words and add a movie.  The technology is so simplistic that it is funny.  The argument is biting and hysterical, in large part because of the monotonous computerized voices.

I love Jon Stewart

Funny guy.  Good perspective.  I think he actually tries harder to be fair and balanced than any "real" news program out there.  This interview made me love him more.

Come on, Jon.  Get out on the field.  Let's set up that 24-hours new channel dedicated to fighting corruption.  You, me, and Bill Moyers.  And maybe Jon Stossel.

The stove of the future

I can't tell who is making this.  It might just be a video mock-up.  But it is pretty cool.  I can't embed the video, so click to watch, and then read the rest of my notes:

http://www.thatvideosite.com/video/the_william_a_glimpse_into_the_stovetops_future

This is a big step in the right direction.  Here's what they need to do in order to make a truly transformational product.

* Add a webcam to the vent-hood, looking down onto the stovetop.
* When you set a pot onto the stove, the webcam looks into the pot and identifies the contents (referencing a database that all stoves share.)
* On the little panel it asks you "is this fresh or frozen broccoli?" if it is unsure.
* If the pot is empty it asks you what you are heating the water for.  If the last time you heated water it was for spaghetti, then that is it's first guess this time.
* It asks you how you want the food cooked.  So for broccoli it would ask how tender you want it.  If it has done this dish for you before then it defaults to how you had it cooked last time.  If need be then it shows you pictures of broccoli in various stages of tenderness and lets you touch the picture you want.
* It asks you what time you want each pot done.
* If you have too little or too much water in the broccoli, then it tells you that, too.
* It has a voice that comes on and says "please come stir the broccoli", when it is time to stir.
* The webcam watches the pots and if something is about to boil over it turns down the heat.

Now that's a stove of the future.  All of the food arrives at the table at the same time and cooked perfectly.

Pattern matching

The video is interesting.  The X-Files background music detracts from the serious nature of the report--a poor editing decision by the El Paso TV station.  I was ready to dismiss this out of hand until they reached the side-by-side comparison of the lights over New York and the lights over El Paso.




I approach life with the assumption that I don't know everything.  I form a framework of what I think is true, and then I try very hard to allow new information to change my framework when it doesn't fit.

I can think of only four possible explanations:
1. Visitors have arrived from another planet.
2. A government is testing some new top secret weapon.
3. A new natural phenomenon has just begun to occur.
4. Somebody is playing a hoax.

I am inclined to dismiss the first three explanations as being too incredibly unlikely.  Long-distance space travel is just plain hard.  Governments have not demonstrated the competence to build technology leaps this large.  And any government that was competent enough to do that wouldn't show it off in the sky above New York City.  And any natural phenomenon would not occur for the first and second times in the same week, like this.

The more times this happens the more likely we are to get an explanation.  My guess is that it has to happen at least ten times or we will not get an explanation.

If I were the marketing director for a new movie about aliens landing on earth, this is exactly the sort of viral marketing campaign I would do.  I wouldn't actually put the lights in the sky.  I would just film realistic crowd scenes of people looking at the sky and then use photoshop to fake the sky images.

That said, the video is still spooky and unnerving.

This is how you fix Congress

One of my aunts just sent me this chain email.  I have a policy against forwarding them, because I know that many of them are spawned by spam marketing companies who use them to harvest email addresses.  But this one made me laugh, so I decided to post it.  This is unedited.

"

Congressional Reform Act of 2010

1. Term Limits.

  12 years only, one of the possible options below..

  A. Two Six-year Senate terms
  B. Six Two-year House terms
  C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms

2.  No Tenure / No Pension.

A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.  

3.  Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.

All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately.  All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. 

4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise.  Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

7. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

8. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/11.

The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen.  Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.
""

It's a good start.  Most of these are too vague to be enforced.  Number eight would probably qualify as an ex poste facto law, and would not hold up in court.

Do you care about the internet?

Cory Doctrow has a brilliant op-ed in The Guardian concerning freedom, copying, paying artists, and the many bone-headed attempts to police the internet.  If you care about the internet then you need to read this article.

I particularly like this quote:

"copying isn't going to get harder, ever."

That sentence fragment is fairly important.  If you are hoping to never live in an Orwellian nightmare then you need to digest and understand that point.

Do you get the internet?

Take this little test.

If you lol then you understand the internet.

If you don't get it then don't fear.  It's not that important.  It's just the internet.

Linkin Park grew up?

I've never been a big fan of Linkin Park.  I watched this new video because I heard that the effects were cool and interesting.  That is true, but I must say that the sound and the lyrics are much more mature than I expected from these guys.  I wonder what happened.

The video is worth upscaling to full 1080p HD and watching full screen.







Lyrics (courtesy of directlyrics.com):

This is not the end
This is not the beginning
Just a voice like a riot
Rocking every revision
But you listen to the tone
And the violent rhythm
Though the words sound steady
Something emptys within em

We say yeah

With fists flying up in the air
Like we’re holding onto something that’s invisible there
Cuz we’re living at the mercy of the pain and the fear
Until we dead it forget it
Let it all disappear

Waiting for the end to come
Wishing I had strenght to stand
This is not what I had planned
It’s out of my control

Flying at the speed of light
Thoughts were spinning in my head
So many things were left unsaid
It’s hard to let you go

I know what it takes to move on
I know how it feels to lie
All I wanna do is trade this life for something new
Holding on to what I haven’t got

Sitting in an empty room
Trying to forget the past
This was never meant to last
I wish it wasn’t so

What was left when that fire was gone
I thought it felt right but that right was wrong
All caught up in the eye of the storm
And trying to figure out what it’s like moving on

And I don’t even know what kind of things I said
My mouth kept moving and my mind went dead
Picking up those pieces now where to begin
The hardest part of ending is starting again

All I wanna do is trade this life for something new
Holding on to what I haven’t got

This is not the end
This is not the beginning
Just a voice like a riot
Rocking every revision
But you listen to the tone
And the violent rhythm
Though the words sound steady
Something emptys within em

We say yeah

With fists flying up in the air
Like we’re holding onto something that’s invisible there
Cuz we’re living at the mercy of the pain and the fear
Until we dead it forget it
Let it all disappear

Professional journalism

I love Wikipedia.  I link to it often for simple stories and scientific notes.  But Wikipedia has a huge problem.  It lacks professional journalistic ethics and backbone.

This article in the Village Voice is the best example I have found of Wikipedia's failure.  Warning: this article is primarily about a wealthy man committing incest with his daughter.  It's professionally written, but the subject matter is disturbing, even handled professionally.  But the end of the article outs Wikipedia for its lack of backbone.

I did search Wikipedia in order to confirm the accusations in the Village Voice article.

Professional journalism is dying.  That is a shame.  We should endeavor to find a way to maintain the investigative research and ethics of truth-telling that exists in some parts of the journalism animal.  We will all be worse off if that spirit dies.

funny video break

Good men

I found a new website the other day.  It's a new magazine called 'The Good Man Project'.  It's focused on the positive and uplifting aspects of manliness.  Honor, integrity, strength, respect.  No lingerie photos.  No pro sports talk.

What does it take to be a good man?
son?
husband?
father?
employee?
boss?
neighbor?
citizen?

There is something of a liberal slant.  It's not religious at all.  But real men should feel right at home.

I have a few half-finished blog posts that I am thinking about submitting there instead of posting here.

Yes, I write on most days.  When you don't see a new post here it's because I couldn't finish the article I was writing.  I have no deadlines or goals other than my own need to produce and eye for quality, so I only publish a post when I feel it is done enough.