Category: Computers and Internet

New Scientist this week has a story about a novel interface for calculators. The demonstration movie is particularly striking. I assume that it will work out-of-the-box on Tablet PCs.

I think that indeed this interface is more "natural" for those of us who do not use calculators all day and every day. Practitioners have presumably already made the necessary learning to adapt to the calculator interface. For more infrequent users (e.g. me), this new interface would really help – and it ties right back into how I learned mathematics with pen and paper.

A good interface should disappear when you’re using it – it should never, ever, get in the way. That’s one of the reasons why I hated with a passion the old Reverse Polish interfaces on the original HP calculators, and why I still end up with wrong answers on today’s calculators – the interface is fighting with what I learned with pen and paper.

I’ve downloaded the software, and am trying it out on my PC, which has a graphics tablet. If this works, then I’ll be able to consign the Windows Calculator application to the dustbin of history…

P.S. I simply adore the title of the web page at the University of Swansea.

And I almost missed it…

Today marks the birth of Alan Turing, mathematician, logician and one of the founders of computer science. He worked at Bletchley Park during World War II and was instrumental in cracking the Enigma code.

He was homosexual, and, according to the laws at the time, was prosecuted for "gross indecency and sexual perversion". As a result it seems likely that he committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.

His life became the subject of a play written by Hugh Whitemore: Breaking the Code. While a dramatisation, it still conveys something of the life and pressures that Turing must have been under. The title role was played by Derek Jacobi, who was perfect. As Jacobi himself has said, "the play really does put across the story of Alan Turing as a man who saved the State and who was then destroyed by the State".

The play is available on video with Jacobi in the role. Try and track it down if you can. At all costs avoid Enigma – a crass film based on Robert Harris’ novel of the same name. The film overlays many of Turing’s thoughts and ideas onto its fictional heterosexual hero. Yet another example of the ways in which gays are edited out of history.

Turing was born in a house that is now the Colonnade Hotel, in Maida Vale, London. The fact is marked by a blue plaque (see the photograph). I spent a number of happy years living just around the corner, in Bristol Gardens, and was pleased to discover the Turing connection. Another connection was that in the days of the Gay Liberation Front in the early 1970s, I met with Andrew Hodges, who became Turing’s biographer, and who maintains a web site devoted to the life and work of Turing.

Improbable Research today draws our attention to the inventor of the PING program – which tests connectivity between devices on a TCP/IP network.

The computer standards behind all this are documented in Request For Comment papers (RFCs for short) that are held by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

I think a better candidate for Improbable Research would have been RFC 1149 – a standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avian carriers…

Now this, this is excellent: Don’t Click It! – an experiment, a work of art, a thesis. Go there – now – and try it out.

I particularly enjoyed hearing Orson again – just in time before a new incarnation comes via Spielberg…

And the mousewrap is the perfect solution for all you masochists out there!

…Who else but Microsoft?

Yet another of my "shooting fish in a barrel" posts, but this time I’m not taking aim at Microsoft, but at the lazy thinkers who have tut-tutted over the story that Microsoft is "Helping China to Censor Bloggers". At first blush, you might think that the protesters have a point. I mean, just look at the opening of the story in The Guardian, for heaven’s sake:

Civil liberties groups have condemned an arrangement between Microsoft and Chinese authorities to censor the internet.

The American company is helping censors remove "freedom" and "democracy" from the net in China with a software package that prevents bloggers from using these and other politically sensitive words on their websites.

The restrictions, which also include an automated denial of "human rights", are built into MSN Spaces, a blog service launched in China last month by Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology, a venture in which Microsoft holds a 50% stake.

Gosh, open and shut case, right? Nasty Microsoft! Linux rocks!

Well, let’s just read on shall we…

Users who try to include such terms in subject lines are warned: "This topic contains forbidden words. Please delete them."

Er, what was that? The "subject line"? What about the body text of the blog, then?

Even the most basic political discussion is difficult because "communism", "socialism", and "capitalism" are blocked in this way, although these words can be used in the body of the main text.

Ah, I see, so Chinese bloggers can actually use these words in the body text? So perhaps it’s not quite as simple a story as it might seem? As Dare Obasanjo points out on his blog, this "story" is not new – every localised version of MSN Spaces has its unique list of prohibited words for the subject line of blog entries. And while US bloggers are pointing the finger at the Chinese version of MSN Spaces, they could do well to ask themselves why the list of prohibited words for the US version of MSN Spaces includes such dangerous words as "Chicken" and "Thrush". Clearly there’s something about those words that Microsoft felt would, in the current US political and legal climate, be asking for trouble.

To my mind, there’s a good case here of "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" – a point well made by Shelley over at Burningbird.

Following on from my last post about QR codes, here’s one about RFID.

I was watching another of the video podcasts from Microsoft’s TechEd 2005. This one was an interview with Brian Keller (a Microsoftie). My ears perked up when he said that all the attendee badges had RFID tags, and that Microsoft were using them to track movements of attendees and staff around the conference. He was careful to stress that Microsoft were only collecting "anonymous data", however, the fact remains that each tag has a unique ID, and therefore it would be very easy to track individuals should an organisation desire to do so.

Thin end of the wedge time. I also wonder if Microsoft will be able to repeat this exercise in Amsterdam for the European TechEd next month. The EU has much stricter regulations around data privacy. I wonder whether this will extend to attendees having to sign for their badges at registration to signify that they agree to Microsoft tracking their movements, even if it is in aggregate?

You’re familiar with barcodes, right? Those ubiquitous stripes on practically everything today. But have you heard of QR codes? I hadn’t until quite recently. They are a similar idea (a way of putting machine-readable codes onto things), but QR codes can store much more information. In Japan, it’s a popular way to exchange URLs and other information. Mobile phones in Japan can read the codes using their built in cameras.

I was reminded about this today while watching the video podcasts from Microsoft’s TechEd 2005 (put this feed into your Podcasting client to get them. If you haven’t got a Podcast client, you can see the URLs for the individual videos here).

I happened to notice that the Microsoft attendee name badges had QR codes instead of barcodes. I couldn’t help wondering if QR codes were chosen because they can be read much more easily by cameras, and don’t require the specialised readers that barcodes do.

Once upon a time, there was a software program called Expressions, written by a company called Creature House. Expressions was a vector-based image graphics program. It apparently gained a strong foothold in the animation and cartoon market (so I understand).

Microsoft liked it so much that they bought the company, and now a beta version of the next version – now renamed as "Acrylic" – is available for free download and testing here.

I note that Microsoft talks of the software as being "innovative" and offering "exciting creative capabilities" for designers working in print, web, video and interactive media. "Innovative" is usually marketing-speak for "it’s got a bizarre user interface that is completely different from anything else you’ve ever used". Similarly, "exciting creative capabilities" means: "so you’ll bang your head against the wall while you try and learn it, and feel inordinately proud of yourself once you’ve succeeded in produced something that looks better than a child’s finger-daub painting".

Clearly, Microsoft would like to move into the highend creative graphics market, currently sewnup and owned by Adobe. Whether Acrylic is the product that is going to do it remains to be seen. Meanwhile, if you’d like to try it out, be my guest – just tape a cushion to the wall first.

Look out – Façade is on its way. Billed as "an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative – an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama". The blurb goes on:

You, the player, using your own name and gender, play the character of a longtime friend of Grace and Trip, an attractive and materially successful couple in their early thirties. During an evening get-together at their apartment that quickly turns ugly, you become entangled in the high-conflict dissolution of Grace and Trip’s marriage.

Er, excuse me, is this entertainment, a training experience, or a reminder that I sometimes want to get away from real life and switch off for a couple of hours? I don’t think I want to witness the breakup of someone’s marriage – I’ve seen too much of that in the real world.

I think I’m getting nostalgic for the days when computer games consisted of "go North" and "a hollow voice says ‘Plugh!’"

If you’re interested in computers, you probably already know about the big announcement that Apple made yesterday. If you didn’t already know, then Apple has announced that it’s moving from processor chips made by IBM to ones made by Intel. Take it from me, this is a big deal.

John Siracusa has written another excellent article giving the ramifications, as he sees it (and I think he’s hit the nail on the head), to this major change of direction.

It’s been a long time coming, but finally Microsoft has announced that the default file formats for Microsoft Office will be non-proprietary and open. They will be based on XML, and as well as being supported in the forthcoming Office 12, Microsoft will also release add-ons to make them usable by Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003.

I remember asking Microsoft for non-proprietary file formats back in the early 1990s – in the days when I was a customer representative in the X/Open consortium (now The Open Group). At the time, we thought such formats would probably be based on HTML, but it wasn’t until the advent of XML that the dream really became a practical possibility.

Microsoft sort of toyed with the idea of XML-based formats in Office 2003, but as Owen Allan points out in his blog, a) they aren’t the default file formats and b) they create huge files "Some word documents that were saved in the XML file format were so large that they had their own weather systems".

Channel 9 has a video interview with Brian Jones, a Program Manager for Microsoft Word, talking about the new format. He also has an entry on his own blog talking about the new format, with pointers to more technical information. 

With all the hoopla going on about this, I do find it interesting that no-one from the Microsoft camp seems to have referred to the Open Document Format initiative of the EU Commission. Even Microsoft’s press release claims that the reason they are doing this is to make it "easier for companies to adopt Office 12". Not a mention by Steve Sinofsky about the ODF initiative, despite that fact that he has been in correspondence with the EU Commission about it. I suppose that he didn’t want to admit that European governments, in particular, are likely to require open document formats as a basis for doing business with them.

The ODF initiative led to the setting up of a technical committee in OASIS to develop an XML-based Open Document Format. They delivered version 1.0 of the specification last month. I’m sure the timing of the me-too Microsoft announcement is pure coincidence. So now we will have two XML-based open document formats going forward. Hopefully it won’t be too difficult to build a bridge between them.

For the geeks – sorry, I mean aficionados of computing history – amongst us, here’s a web site devoted to the history of computer languages, complete with a family tree. There’s about 50 languages listed here, but if you’re a real anorak, then follow the link to Bill Kinnersley’s page – he has 2,500 listed. In the course of the years, I’ve had a working knowledge of about 15 along the way, but now I’m rusty in practically all of them.

20Q.net is an experiment in artificial intelligence. It’s an eerie take on the old game of Twenty Questions, where you think of something, and the object of the questioner (in this case the neural net program) is to discover what you are thinking in 20 questions or less.

Try it. The more people that play, the better it gets.

There’s now even a portable version of the game, which contains a chip holding 250,000 synaptic connections to the most popular 2,000 objects that people challenge the game with.

Now, I run Windows here at home, but I’ve always been interested in what Apple were up to with the Macintosh. Actually, my interest predates the Macintosh – I did an in-house review of the Lisa for work, way back in 1983. And for a time, my first home computer was an Atari ST running as an Apple Macintosh using the Spectre GCR emulator developed by Dave Small. But eventually I went over to the dark side (as some of the Apple enthusiasts would say) and adopted the Windows platform, starting with Windows 95.

Be that as it may, today sees the launch of the latest incarnation of Apple’s Macintosh operating system, in the shape of OS X 10.4 – the "Tiger".

And, over at Ars.Technica, John Siracusa has done a really magnificent job of reviewing the operating system. It’s a long review (21 pages – and apparently the PDF version available to subscribers weighs in at over 100 pages), but well worth reading. He shares my passion for metadata, so I’m pleased to see that metadata is at last beginning to take its rightful place in the file system fabric. I can see parallels here with what Microsoft have done with the metadata in Windows, and what they want to do in Longhorn.

And the Macintosh operating system is built on Unix. One of the bad things about Unix was the severe restrictions of Access Control Lists (ACLs – who can do what to which files). While the Macintosh OS extended the capabilities of ACLs, it’s only now, with Tiger, that Apple have finally introduced the same flexibility as Windows offers with its ACLs. In fact, now Tiger gives the ability for a Tiger server to participate fully in a Windows network.

I suppose, in summary, my impression is that Apple and Microsoft are engaged in a game of leapfrog. It appears, reading this review, as though with the release of Tiger, Apple has finally caught up with some of the fundamental platform capabilities of Windows, and in some areas – the metadata and the GUI in particular, exceeded what Windows is currently capable of. I expect Microsoft to try and pass Apple when theyr release Longhorn late in 2006.

Infoworld reports on a recent study by Deloitte and Touche that demonstrates that outsourcing is far from a silver bullet for organisations seeking to make their IT operations more efficient. The report itself makes for interesting reading.

An interesting post from Dare Obasanjo today. While I expect the Slashdot kids to heave rocks at their hated foe Microsoft at every opportunity, it is somewhat different when a Microsoftie such as Dare refers to "the current malaise that has smothered main campus [at Microsoft]".

Watch this space – I think the pressure is building.