Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: Computers and Internet

  • And The Point Is?

    The Nabaztag Rabbit. Suddenly, a cybernetic equivalent of myxomatosis seems a rather good idea…

  • Artificial Stupidity

    In addition to Muse, Microsoft had the bright idea of adding another Artificial Intelligence bot to its Windows Live Messenger service. So last week, Santa Claus made his appearance. Unfortunately, it appears as though this particular Santa Claus is rather a loose cannon, and not particularly child-friendly. The Register has the details.
     
    One thing though, I see that the Register was alerted to this by someone whose 11 and 13 year old nieces "do not still fully believe in Santa Claus". This I find bizarre – it implies that the older one gets, the more fully one believes in the man in the red suit. Even if the whistleblower meant it in the reverse sense, I’m still somewhat surprised – I twigged that Santa was my parents at a much earlier age, and we lived in much more innocent times then…

  • A Server In The Home

    I see that Microsoft has started tongue-in-cheek advertising for their Windows Home Server. Not bad, I rather liked the children’s book:
    When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much,
    the daddy wants to give the mommy a special gift.
     
    …So he buys a "Stay-at-Home" server.
    There’s actually quite a serious point being made here. How do you market something like Windows Home Server to the consumer? The team behind the Windows Home Server discuss it over at their blog.
     

  • The March of Technology

    It wasn’t so very long ago that portable computers weighed in at 22 lbs (10 kgs). Here’s John Cleese extolling the virtues of the Compaq Portable II.
     
     
     
    (hat tip to Charles Arthur over at the Guardian)

  • reCAPTCHA

    Brilliant, just brilliant…

  • The Machine is Us/ing Us

    Here’s a terrific little video that conveys something of the excitement I feel when I think about the Web and the extraordinary changes that I’ve seen in its technology in the last 15 years.
     
     
    It really doesn’t seem that long ago that I was creating web pages using Notepad (see about one minute into the video). And I wonder if most people watching this video appreciate the enormous change that is taking place as a result of the change from form to content. When we started, the web was all about form – HTML is a markup language – it describes how a page should look; but with the advent of XML, we are describing not just form, but content itself. It’s the change from passively viewing the web to actively programming the web.
     
    (hat tip to the Prospect blog for the link)

  • The Art of Hyperlinking

    Jeff Atwood has an interesting post over at Coding Horror on the art of hyperlinking. Naturally, he refers to Ted Nelson and Project Xanadu, which I’ve also mentioned in passing before. But Atwood has a link to a 1995 article (in Wired) on Nelson, which I hadn’t read, and which gives a lot of background on the man and his motivations. In turns haunting, despairing or seemingly totally insane, the people who swim through this aquarium are not those with both feet firmly on the ground:
    "Nelson records everything and remembers nothing. Xanadu was to have been his cure. To assist in the procedure, he called upon a team of professionals, some of whom also happened to be his closest friends and disciples. In the end, the patient survived the operation. But it nearly killed the doctors".
    Definitely worth a read. Atwood rounds off his post with an excellent summary of link usability tips. I wish that more web designers would follow them.

  • Windows Home Server

    Now that Microsoft has released the Windows Home Server product, I went ahead and bought the OEM version to install on the computer that I use as a server in our home network. Overall, I’m fairly pleased with it, it does (mostly) what it says on the tin with a minimum of fuss. However, there’s one thing that continues to irk me: Microsoft’s marketing claims do not tell the whole story, they are being economical with the truth.

    Microsoft claims that you can remote access “any home computer” using the product. For example, see this screenshot of the welcome page when I remotely log into my home server:

    WHS Remote Access 3

    Even on Microsoft’s product pages, their FAQ says that: “Windows Home Server … also allows you to connect remotely and use your home computers as if you were sitting in front of them”. See:

    WHS Remote Access 2

    Unfortunately, when Microsoft says “any home computer”, they don’t actually mean “any”. What they mean is their top-end operating systems: Windows XP Professional, Vista Business or Vista Ultimate. Those of us with Vista Home Basic or Vista Home Premium cannot remotely access their home PCs running those operating systems:

    WHS - Remote Access

    I really find this ridiculous. I’ve blogged about this before – I came across it while I was beta-testing the product. I had hoped that Microsoft would have remedied this with the final release of the product. But no, so I can reprise my rant:

    Let me get this straight, the Windows Home Server product, the one that is supposed to be for ordinary mortals, not geeks, the one that is supposed to give you remote access to any computer in your home, won’t actually do this if you have Windows XP Home, Vista Home Basic or Vista Home Premium installed on your home computers? You actually have to have XP Professional, Vista Ultimate, Vista Business or, gawd help us, Vista Enterprise installed on your goddam home computers?
    I’ve heard some nonsense in my time, but this takes some beating. The whole raison d’etre of Windows Home Server is being torpedoed by a product packaging decision… how stupid is that?
    Well, of course most homes will have XP Home, Vista Home Basic or Vista Home Premium. Only geeks buy XP Professional or Vista Ultimate… What really irritates me is that I had Windows XP Professional at home on all our systems, but wanted to move to Vista Home Premium in an attempt to be less geeky. More fool me, I suppose.

    I notice that none of the glowing reviews of Windows Home Server that I’ve seen (with the honourable exception of Paul Thurrott) has actually picked up on this shortcoming. Clearly, they’re all a bunch of geeks running Vista Ultimate, so this product hole goes straight over their heads. The rest of us mere mortals just fall straight into it.

  • We’re Doomed…

    Courtesy of Vaughan, over at Mind Hacks, I bring you yet another episode in the ongoing "We’re Doomed" saga. What really made me pause is the snippet that the robot that will be deployed on the border between North and South Korea is manufactured by Samsung. Now I fully understand the reason behind the phrase "a sensible bit of Samsung". Clearly, some Samsung employees are just as scared as the rest of us…

  • Drowning in Features

    Jeff Atwood, over at Coding Horror, makes what I think is a very valid point: adding features into new releases of software applications can spoil the software. I’ve seen it happen a number of times to applications that I use. What started out as a terrific little application that did one job very well indeed degenerates into bloatware that contains features that I never use and never wanted. The performance often goes down the toilet as well.
     
    A case in point, for me, is Nero. I first bought it to burn some CDs, and that’s all I ever use it for. In the meantime, it has bloated into a huge suite of applications, which often cause more trouble than they are worth. The online updating mechanism, for example, has never, ever, worked properly for me. I have to download a complete fresh install. What started out as an application of less than 10MB (as I recall) now weighs in at a staggering 178 MB. I won’t be upgrading to version 8 of Nero.

  • Chat With God

    I see that someone has set up a chatbot that gives you the opportunity to chat with God. I was about three sentences in before God replied: "you know, not many people express themselves that way". About par for the course, I suppose, but it doesn’t say much about his omniscience.
     
    Oh, and the Google Ads across the top of the page helpfully had a link to 2008: God’s Final Witness (Unprecendented destruction will come in 2008, leading to America’s fall). Clear evidence that while God may not exist, the world is certainly stuffed full of crazy people…

  • i-Sobot

    Ooh – move over Aibo, I think you’ve got competition…

  • Not A Good Idea

    I really wish they wouldn’t do it. Microsoft, I mean. It’s almost as though they encourage the "evil empire" persona – the company that you love to hate. They’re at it again. They’re showing off the technology that enables dynamic advertising within computer games.
    "The idea is to have advertisements appear and fit in naturally to the games just as they would in real life," said Jay Sampson, vice president of North American and Asia Pacific sales for Massive, Microsoft’s in-game advertising marketplace. 
    Er, listen Jay, I detest the pollution of advertising, and the thought that you are gleefully bringing it to new frontiers makes me want to vomit.
     

  • Fry On Smartphones

    National Treasure Stephen Fry is passionate about gizmos and gadgets. On his newly begun blog he has a quite staggeringly good post on Smartphones that he has known. Well worth reading. 

  • History Repeats

    Joel Spolsky writes about software development, among other things. His current article is well worth reading. In summary, it says, in effect, that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. My money is on him being proved right. Those of us who have been in the business for a long time can see the signs, but Spolsky spins the story to show the writing on the wall for all to see.

  • Real Fakes

    You may have already seen the "Haiti UFO" video. Posted on YouTube a month ago, it’s already been seen by millions, and purports to show a real flying saucer.
     
    Of course, it’s a fake.
     
    The maker of the video has now followed it up with another "proof" video, this time purporting to show that the flying saucer is a small radio-controlled model being flown by a little old lady. The joke is that in both cases the flying saucer is not real – it’s a computer-generated model. As the article in the eSkeptic magazine says: we’re now definitely at the point where seamlessly photorealistic fake UFO footage can be made on an ordinary home computer, quickly and easily, using only a few hundred bucks worth of software.

  • Aarrgh!

    Sometimes I really detest the young. They will inherit the world. And all the things that we have fought for, they will not care one whit about. To them it is boring, old-fashioned, worthless. English Grammar for example.
     
    The bright young things over at the product team for Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger had an idea. Instruction manuals are boring. So, the bright young things decided to make an instructional video for Windows Live Messenger. "Sarah", their video avatar, is also a bright young thing, and she introduces the various features of Windows Live Messenger in a bright, perky, up-to-the-minute way.
     
    As you can imagine, I am metamorphosing into Victor Meldrew at the very thought. However, I did try to keep my negative thoughts at bay. Oh, I really did. But then, when Sarah started talking about the socialisation features of Windows Live Messenger, I regret to say that I completely lost it. She types in a personalised invitation, and what does she type?
    "Hey! Let me know next time your online!"
    Grammar 
     
    Dear god, is there no-one in the long chain, from the lowly web developer in Microsoft through the marketing hordes to the head honcho responsible for releasing this to the world, capable of recognising a schoolboy howler in simple English grammar?
     
    Apparently not. It’s "you’re", not "your" you stupid, stupid people.
     
    May you all rot in grammar hell.
       

  • Mabel’s Murky Past

    I see that the Wikiscanner has claimed another victim – this time Princess Mabel.  

  • Jealousy

    OK, so I know that it is very shallow of me, but I can’t help feeling a teeny bit jealous of Phil.
     
     

  • Geek Humour

    While it’s clearly a joke, the phrases uttered by the "designers" of this world-shattering piece of software are terrifyingly like the sort of crap marketing-speak that I’ve come to know and loathe. 
     
     
    Nicely done.