Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog
Archive for January, 2008
Monday, January 28th, 2008
Maybe you’ve had the following happen.
Your bank sends you a monthly statement with your full name, including middle initial, visible through the cellophane window.
At your local food club, they had you a brochure about their internet site, and then say you’ll get your password in an email. If you’re like most people, you then expect them to send other information through email.
If you go to a pay phone, put a handkerchief over it, and phone your recruiter, you can tell them you’re 7-11 and you’re hiring programmers, can you get some background on your-name-here? and get actual information, including an address.
A friend once told me that the problem with humanity is a technological society in which we still have stone-age minds. I think he was being cynical, but the point is that we’re overwhelmed with data.
Businesses shouldn’t expect us to learn a new process for each business. Yes, it’s the bank but we have fifty or so businesses equally important to our daily existence. If each one has its own username, password, web site, and worse, procedure and separate security rules, we don’t have a chance of remembering it.
And if we do, we’ll be losing out on other more interesting things to do with our time.
Businesses need to wake up to the new reality. People are busy and overloaded. They need to make their web interfaces standard, security, and moron-simple, because even if we’re not morons we’re probably on the phone, thinking about something happening at work, and consoling a bored child as we use that ATM.
If you want people not to get hacked, phished, and ID-thieved, you need to hide their data. You need to standardize your process. You need to test every script on your website for overflows, injections, and cross-context variables. You also need to test the browser technologies that can hijack people’s data.
But most of all, you need to communicate about security, because only when people are aware of the process and know all of its steps can they spot something that’s out of line.
Posted in Computer Security, Information Technology | No Comments »
Monday, January 28th, 2008
I was an Apple and Mac zealot when there really was a significant difference in technology and user experience between Apple and Microsoft. That was when Windows was a poor substitute for the experience the Mac OS delivered. But around the time of Windows 95, things changed. The Mac became almost as unstable and complicated to run as Windows 95.
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My number one gripe, and still is today, is Apple’s attitude towards closed hardware. The PC has so many more options available, whether it be hardware, software or peripherals. The Macbook Air proved again Apple’s arrogance about closed hardware. Same with the iPhone. Who wants to be without their laptop or phone while their battery is being replaced.
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What’s ironic is now that I don’t wear my Apple fan boy glasses anymore, today Apple looks more like the company Apple fought against in the “1984 doesn’t have to be like 1984″ commercial. ^
Apple, like many marketing efforts, is the anti-sell. Don’t be a stodgy old boring fuss, get a Mac, and be an artist. You keep using that boring corporate software, if you want to be like your dad. We’re young. We’re hip. We’re the counterculture. As if there are such clear divisions in life, and as if image made reality.
It’s an appealling message to their audience, most of whom are paid better than average but not enough to really make any kind of long-term difference in lifestyle. Upper-crust wage slave is still wage slave. Graphic designers, writers, programmers and others get paid a fraction of the value they generate for a company, but having an elite computer brand helps (they think).
As any experienced marketer will tell you, however, the problem is that marketing is just marketing. It aims to provide for you a picture of a brand, and in that picture, the product is made with one concept in mind. In reality, it’s a variation on other ideas, and is never as innovative or different as you think. Apple has become an entertainment industry version of the 1984 IBM they despised, complete with lawsuits against competitors and C&D letters to bloggers.
I once was an Apple believer as well. I put up with buying $2000 computers only to have Apple come out with a new model six months later that I could just about upgrade to for $1500. I put up with the defective motherboards whose status was never announced, leaving us to figure it out on our own and stagger into an overpriced Apple service bureau. I put up with the failure of backward compatibility, of the flaky marketing, and so on.
A brand is only so strong as the image on which it delivers, consistently.
But after years of seeing shoddy hardware hyped as “the next big thing,” and hearing about Apple innovations which are either bought from other companies or borrowed ideas made better, I’ve concluded that like most other people I don’t need overstyled hardware. What I need is solid technology that interoperates well, and doesn’t require my slavish devotion to a marketing meme.
Posted in Branding, Information Technology | No Comments »
Saturday, January 26th, 2008
I was looking for a word today to describe an optimal situation in design, where a proposed idea matches its function exactly. It means part efficiency, part good design, part relevance to the task (even if the client isn’t fully aware of it). I found:
Arete (areth): Appropriate form to or for purpose, with strong overtones of ideal good
When it comes to technology design, it doesn’t get any clearer than that.
Posted in Culture | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.
From where I sit, traditional “literary fiction” has dropped the ball. I studied literature in college, and throughout my twenties I voraciously read contemporary fiction. Then, eight or nine years ago, I found myself getting — well — bored.
Why? I think it’s because I was reading novel after novel about the real world. And there are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality. After I’d read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I was like, “OK. Cool. I see how today’s world works.” I also started to feel like I’d been reading the same book over and over again. ^
Clive makes a juicy point here: literature that attempts to be realistic spends all of its time describing what we have today, which is observable by just about anyone. Its only way to make itself compelling is to show us details we haven’t seen already, but the question is really how informative are those details? The answer is not much, even if read in large doses.
 Literature today, like music today, struggles with its own productification. There are people to buy it, so they’ve found a way to mass produce it, which is the realistic novel. In it, people write about the personal drama of individuals adapting to the current lifestyle. The problem is that there’s no struggle, journey or learning in that other than the most shallow questions of acceptance and social status.
With that in mind, we do not need realistic literature. Life will always be more real than literature. What we need is literature that re-invests language with meaning by showing us struggle, journey and learning. It needs to show characters have transformative, not cathartic, experiences that change the way they look at life itself in some fundamental way.
Another world for realistic literature is mundane literature. The stores are crammed with it. Each book tells basically the same story, so the authors dress them up the absurd and outlandish in order to make the book distinctive. This is why you can never read a book about normal people, only people with bunches of problems and awkward personal circumstances.
Very few people write about ideas.
If you run a realistic simulation enough times — writing tens of thousands of novels about contemporary life — eventually you’re going to explore almost every outcome. So what do you do then?
You change the physics in the sim. Alter reality — and see what new results you get.
Unfortunately, Clive makes the same mistake. He thinks we should write about alternative realities, or more external dressing up of the same character play, instead of doing what great literature does. Great literature goes inward. It writes about the struggle for the soul of individuals as they find their balance of adaptation with society, and with their own moral knowledge of the right path, even if the people around them do not acknowledge it.
The greatest novels have rejected the cathartic, or the idea that we can tackle a whole load of personal drama and release it somehow, then after our catharsis return to life as it is. The greatest novels are about people who struggle against things as they are and strive to make life conform to a vision only they can see. Even the Bible fits this description. The realistic novel has no such aspirations, and if it bores Clive, I’m sure it will bore you and me.
Posted in Literature | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
People often think that the best way to teach something is to start with its origins and explain it up until the present day. In history, in music, in literature and so on they’re trying this. Others say we should only teach what is current. Both groups are wrong.
You need to teach from what people know, toward what they can know.
If you’re teaching history, it may not make sense to teach from the Sumerians onward. Teach the issues now, then return to the Sumerians, then show how our issues were their issues. You can then move forward in time.
I learned this when looking for music training. The worst kind starts with “What is a note?” and processes you through forty lessons of memorization. The best shows you how to play a song or three, then breaks them down, then re-introduces their parts and then walks you through theory to songwriting.
Launch people into the middle of things, where they can feel what they’re doing is relevant and empowering. Then show them the background. You have to add detail in layers, not linearly from the beginning to the present.
Posted in User Advocacy | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
One of the biggest reasons why Digg became successful was that it provided individuals with the opportunity to govern the site. By way of democracy, users choose which articles were submitted to the site, what made it to the front page, which new features should be implemented, ect. What a novel concept this was in the beginning. Fast forward to today and what do we have?
Digg is now controlled by the majority of users who just so happen to be Apple fanboys, who just happen to be Linux fanboys, who just happen to be political nut cases. Occasionally, you will see an article reach the front page that doesn’t fit in these three categories, but for the most part, these three categories run the roost. At one time, it was ok to submit Digg articles that were housed on blogs. Nope, you can’t do that anymore because the majority of Digg users frown on blogs and consider all blogs to be internet trash. ^
When I first started out, I thought everyone over 30 was retarded and that editors were the scourge of the world. They limited my artistic freedom, stopped my flights of linguistic fancy, made me think about boring things like the audience, the topic, and so on. I’ve changed a lot, but it wasn’t because editors taught me. It’s because I became my own editor.
 Writing does not exist without a preposition. You are writing to someone, or writing for someone, even if you’re writing about someone, and that someone might be yourself, as in the case of fiction. Your audience is your target. Without them, you have a diary. With them, you have a dialogue between author and audience. I want that dialogue because when I write, it’s to share something I’ve discovered. (Even on this dorky blog!)
Editors are a good thing, but it’s not universal. Good editors are a good thing. Bad editors are …you guessed it, a bad thing. Digg needs editors as much as it needs that lovely anarchic groundswell of pure chaos that brings it some of its best stories.
But chaos does best with a master. You wouldn’t want to live in pure chaos, or you couldn’t function. If chaos took over your body, you’d die. It might be that chaos is best praised in Lovecraftian tales, or as part of the creative process that later gets bent to a system of order and clarity. At least, I’ve had the best results that way.
Posted in Culture, Information Technology | 3 Comments »
Monday, January 21st, 2008
The first time someone told me that television was free, I was blown away. All of those programs? For free? How?
They explained advertising to me and I was equally floored. People pay all this money… just so people know what products are there? It was only after that I found out that most products are not necessary for survival but are essentially luxury items, and so advertising helps convince the befuddled to buy. Aha.
 Since the internet is so new, it still goes through spasmodic re-assessments as people who make a living from AdSense try to figure out whether or not it’s real. That’s why every month there’s a new article about a trend.
Some persist, like the “Long Tail” or “The Cathedral Versus the Bazaar” or other restatements of the same basic idea that funds TV: the only real commodity is selling attention span, or for the existentially paranoid, selling your time. About all you can do is sell the attention of others, because that enables you to sell them other things. It is a circular theory, almost a tautology.
People are now talking about applying this theory to the sales of movies and pop music.
The problem I see with it is what happened to video art in the conversion from movies to TV. Movies were an event, but television is more like running water, something you expect to be constant. There are very few stories really worth telling, which means that TV is inevitably tuned toward that worst of all curses, the re-run or the derivative idea.
Free media in other words is a one-way trip to forgettable media. We’ll have so much the quality per item will diminish, and this is what I’m seeing in music, movies and books. They’re all about the same but they try so hard to be different they make themselves bizarre and unreal, but then come back to the same 4 or 5 “uplifting” stories that people will buy.
It will distill society down to its most basic level, which is a competition for social status through drawing attention to oneself. The social rules haven’t changed since we were toddlers, or since our ancestors were apes.
I don’t know what I would rather see, because I can see the dual face of ownership. Free means that no one item gets much investment, because it’s an advertisement for something else. Ownership, while people like to pretend it’s a barrier to utopia, encourages artists to put more effort into their work and take more risks with it.
Realistically, we have one great novelist a generation, and maybe fifty pretty good ones. We shouldn’t have the thousands we do now, because most of them are so bad that they should have blogs instead (haha). The more people we have publishing, the less any content stands out, which means that soon every writer will be a TV channel with not enough viewers, and it’ll be hard to find any greats in the mix.
It’s the same way with where print media is going now, where blogs and web sites give away the news for free. It’s nice to have it free to read, but then, it becomes entirely driven by advertising and rewards weird extremes without deviating much from the norm.
Insight has been and always will be rare. People now are more informed on pop culture, and less informed on critical thinking and knowledge application, than ever before in history. It’s easy to mistake junk for knowledge. As much as we all like free things, the path of free is toward one where junk and knowledge are valued the same.
Posted in Culture | No Comments »
Monday, January 21st, 2008
If you’ve bought a computer from a major manufacturer recently, you’re familiar with this gig. You bought Windows with the machine, but you don’t get an install disk. Instead, you get a second partition on the disk from which you can re-install Windows if you need to.
The only problem is that if the hard disk fails, and that’s the most common failure at 3-5 years of ownership, you don’t get to reinstall legally.
 Microsoft makes a big noise about how many people pirate their software, but from a user-centric point of view, they’re forcing people into piracy. First, they charge corporate rates for their operating systems, which makes no sense as an operating system is required to make the machine do anything. Next, they tie you into these per-machine licenses.
It’s not very productive to encourage people to think of a machine as the way they get their operating system, because next time, they might just buy a different machine. More of them are.
Instead, Microsoft should concentrate on a per-customer basis, where customer is an individual, a family or a business. Get people accounts on the Microsoft site. Buy the operating system and updates are free. Need to add a computer? $25. Need support? Contracts are $50/year.
It’s clean and easy, and it allows Microsoft to sell other products from one Amazon-like interface. It might be too straightforward for the software industry however.
Posted in Information Technology | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 17th, 2008
There’s so much written about the possibilities of Linux that I’m almost afraid to clarified those polluted waters.
But since someone asked today, and I organized my thoughts for that, here’s the verdict. Linux will become adopted in niches, and this will make it important and rewarding for software packages to support both Windows and Linux.
 Sadly, I don’t think BSD is going to be much of a contender, except in the areas it has already conquered. UNIX diehards and server heads will keep using it because, as I can attest, it will rock the world. The Mac hangs on as a luxury product for underpaid people who want to feel important enough to need special computers. The interface isn’t enough removed from Windows and KDE, and the machines are flaky and expensive. So BSD and OS X are out of the picture except as permanent niche computing.
Where Linux is making inroads is on the smaller, cheaper machines, in three big ways:
- Sub-notebooks and portables.
- Refurbishing old machines.
- Home appliance-style computers.
Many of you will note that the first and third categories are the same, excepting portability. That’s because the computer as appliance will be a large theme in the coming years. People have now accepted the computer like TV, stereo, sink disposal, car, phone and food processor into their lives. They don’t see as much difference between machines, and operating systems, because 90% of the users need them for the same fixed set of functions: email, chat, word processing, media storage and playback, web surfing, office applications, telephony, and games.
Linux comes standard on a number of cheap machines, none of which have really gotten their act together. The missing piece is software. OpenOffice isn’t good enough to replace Microsoft Office. Firefox is still buggy. No games of note. Getting the right codecs for your media playback software requires time and effort to research, and most people don’t have that time.
At some point, a brave entrepreneur will fix this problem by creating a standard operating system installation that uses the best of all the software available from the Open Source movement, although some of it will need modification to work in a way end users recognize. They will then trot out a machine that’s smaller, lighter, more durable and cheaper than what’s commonly out there, and people rich and poor will buy it as their desktop appliance.
In the meantime, the convergence comes closer. Many offices now have Linux for server and desktop machines because it’s better for certain tasks, or they don’t want to pay for support licenses. As this niche expands, look for opportunities for software packages that are designed to have versions that work on both systems and interoperate transparently.
Posted in Branding, Information Technology | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
The headband has a trio of sensors across the front, and those sensors read electrical impulses in various frequency ranges, which equate to a number of different facial movements and—so it would seem, at least—patterns of thought.
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Schuette mapped the most basic controls to the facial muscle inputs, but the most impressive input had to be his “jump” key, which he mapped to one of the brain wave readings and activated via what he called his “Tourette’s impulse.” Basically, he’d think of an expletive, and his character would jump.
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One of the things that surprised me about using the headband is how, well, cerebral it is to use. I expected to be contorting my facial muscles wildly in order to use it, but in reality, it’s best to relax and gently control things. On top of that, something about the experience of using it is difficult to articulate but intuitive to apprehend. ^
 We’re halfway there. The new interface uses the complex hardware our machines have for graphics and adapts it to interpret the sine waves our brains produce. It then translates these into motions which, while primitive now, could conceivably be more significant in the future. It can’t read thoughts, in other words, but it can read activity in certain areas of the brain. In William Gibson’s futuristic cyberpunk epic Neuromancer, hackers navigate with a headset for visualization but steer with a keyboard. It will be interesting to see if this headset becomes a two-way interface.
Posted in Culture, Information Technology | No Comments »
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