The Shape of Things to Come

My original concept for Havoc was a tabbed interface consisting of a Calendar, a Note Board and Photos. In fact, the first name for the application was not Havoc, but simply The Noteboard as I thought that would be the focal point of the application. This ended up not being the case. I actually still have no idea what will go on the Noteboard tab or how I will get it there. As I played around with the interface and worked on getting a hardware and software platform nailed down, it began to expand.

This all came about as a result of how I wanted the interface to work in the first place. At its core Havoc is a calendar; you put in information and it reminds you of it in a couple of ways:

1. You can look at the calendar and see what is upcoming.
2. You can set reminders so that Havoc lets you know in advance that some appointment or event is on the horizon. My thought on this one was that when you are not in some sort of contact with the interface, it would go into a screen saver mode. This would not be a real screen saver (which would be deactivated), but rather another screen of Havoc. I would show you today's events and any reminders that had become due. They would float around the screen in very large text and maybe be paired with s random photo from your collection. 
3. This is where things began to get complicated and fun, Havoc would know when you walked into the room and would wake up and tell you of any reminders that were due. This adds the need for some sort of motion detection capability and the need for havoc to be able to speak. Motion detection would require some sort of sensor, or a camera. Adding a camera to the package was intriguing, as that might open up other opportunities.
4. Appointments or events could be assigned a scope, which would be one or more people and reminders could be sent to that person's/those people's cell phone(s). This adds the requirement that the Havoc database be in the cloud and accessible through web services. This also meant that I would be writing an Android app to go along with my Windows desktop app. I figured that I might as well try my hand a Xamarin coding and for the heck of it also write the app for iOS and Windows Phone.  

This gave me a lot to think about and a lot to learn about. How cool could I make this? Just what kind of libraries are available for free (the cost I felt I must pay) and just what would they be capable of doing?

If I could know when someone walked into the room, could I also know who they were? Could I tailor Havoc's responses based on facial recognition? Could I even do facial recognition?

Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise - Day Two - We Get Leied

We started off the second day with the Virgin Party (LRBC first-timers) where we all got leied so that we were no longer virgins. We danced to the sounds of Dennis Jones, who quickly became a favorite of ours.

The Rockets' Red Glare

Pretty cool and what an advertisement for the Phantom 2 personal drone. I didn't know they existed but now I want one.

Slashed!

I had said a few days ago that I was able to remote access my Kindle Fire using Slashtop and that was true up to a point. The point where it was not true was when I left my internal wi-fi and went out into the wild blooming yonder of open access wi-fi. From there I could not get to my desktop. I searched the Kindle Fire Forum and found another app mentioned, TeamViewer and downloaded it.

Today, from my Dr.'s waiting room, I was able to access my home PC and work on my novel. Pretty cool. The problem I had with Slashtop was that it only saw my internalal IP address, not the external one being generated by FIOS. TeamViewer doesn't seem to have that issue.

All Fired Up!

I am all fired up, Kindle Fired up that is. My son bought me a Kindle Fire for Christmas and I have been giddy ever since. I've had it for over a week now but I am really just beginning to see the potential in the product.

Bezos should have come out singing, "I am the God of hell fire and I bring you FIRE!"

I bought a nice leather case for it with a stylus. That comes in handy when I want to use Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile. It will take some getting used to the stylus which is not nearly as easy to use as my Wacom Tablet on the PC, but will suffice for now.

It's Kindle, so all of my Kindle books are available to me for reading at my leisurere. Though not an e-Ink screen, I can still use the Fire as a reader while on the go.

I'm not really much of a gamer, never owned a gaming device, though I have played with my son's XBox 360 and Kinect a number of times, but I seem to be loading the internal memory with  games like Asphalt 6: Adrenaline, Back Stab and Madden 12, all of which play amazingly well on the Fire and for each of which I paid 99 cents. The graphics and the response of the machine are pretty damn amazing.

Video is another treat on the Fire. From YouTube to streaming full movies and TV episodes, the Fire is a smooth experience.

A few months ago I ripped all of my CDs to my PC and then moved all of them to the Amazon Music Cloud so that I could listen to them on my phone or at work. With the Fire I have access to my entire music collection.

A few months ago I gave my laptop to my step-son who needed it for work and so I went through November's NaNoWriMo without benifit of a way to go out and socialize while writing. I wrote my first novel using Scrivener for Windows and put my Scriverner data files into my Dropbox folder which allowed me to have access to them on my PC and my phone and anywhere else I had a Dropbox folder. Well, though not natively supported on the Fire, I was able to side load Dropbox onto the Fire, so my novel is now there as well. My problem is editing the files. The Fire does not have an editor for RTF (Rich Text Format) files, which is what Scrivener uses, so though I have access to them on my Fire, I still cannot edit them. Enter Slashtop!

Slashtop is a remote access app that allows me to have access to my PC desktop on my Fire. Utilizing Slashtop I have been able to work on my novel from my Fire. Not a perfect solution, but it does work and for the time being, that is enough for me.

So let's see if I can bottom-line this. I can surf the web, play amazing games, read my books, paint and draw, watch movies and TV, listen to my music and write my novel all from a $199 tablet, all for $300 less than the cheapest iPad. Only a complete fool would waste their money on the big Apple.

The Truth About the Appleheads Among Us

I saw this first over the weekend as an in-theater ad shown before Melancholia and it cracked me up. These snooty, lame-ass, self-absorbed frauds and the perfect commentary on the army of unthinking iPhone users. Assholes standing in lines for hours to get a phone that looks just like the phone they already have and worried that people won't know they have the new phone, 'casue it is all about image and not at all about having a great phone, not even sure of the specs to the phone they are standing in line for hours to purchase. This is simply priceless.

The Kinect Effect

I saw this commercial on TV twice in the past day or so and had to share it. It moves me. Ah Microsoft, what a great commercial and what a great technology. The Kinect is surely the "big-titted hit" it deserves to be.

A Time Lapse View of Earth From the ISS

The crew of expeditions 28 and 29 onboard the International Space Station took a series of time lapse photographs of earth from August to October, 2011. Here they are strung together in a video; an amazing look at our planet. Blow this up full screen and take five minutes to enjoy the world you live on.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Dismal Nitch

We are back from our weeklong+ trip to Oregon and Washington. One of the fun aspects of it for me was trying out my new camera (a Sony DSC-H20), which is the best camera I have ever owned. Here is a picture of my wife, Dayle, taken at a place called Dismal Nitch. We found a lot of depressingly named places along the Columbia River. Dismal Nitch is just across the river from Astoria, Oregon, where we spent the first night of our vacation. We wondered about the names of these places and learned that they go all the way back to the Lewis and Clark expedition. According to the Fort Clatsop Bookstore:

Heavey (sic) storms confined the members of the Corps of Discovery near the mouth of the Columbia River. For six days in November 1805, they set up camp at an area Wm. Clark referred to as a "dismal nitich". (sic) Today, this place is still called "Dismal Nitch" and is located just east of the Washington end of the Astoria/Megler Bridge.

Eye-Balling the Internet

As this article explains, we may be just a few years away from some Steve Austin-like eyewear, electronic contact lenses that could give you bionic eyesight and let you surf the web directly on your eye. They are not there yet, but in a few years? Who knows?

I Don't Know a Whole Lot About FIOS...

...but if Time Warner drops Comedy Central at midnight, I am moving to FIOS the second it becomes available in my neighborhood (and they were laying new fiber-optic cable on my street just last week).

The Droud

Anyone who ever read Larry Niven's The Ringworld Engineers knows that at the beginning of the book Louis Wu, the protagonist from Ringworld, has become a "current addict" or a "wirehead," he has become addicted to the Droud, a device that directs electrical current into his brain, stimulating the pleasure centers. Behold: the Droud!

Scientists are developing an electronic "sex chip" that can be implanted into the brain to stimulate pleasure.

The chip works by sending tiny shocks from implanted electrodes in the brain.

The technology has been used in the United States to treat Parkinson's disease.

But in recent months scientists have been focusing on the area of the brain just behind the eyes known as the orbitofrontal cortex - this is associated with feelings of pleasure derived from eating and sex.

A research survey conducted by Morten Kringelbach, senior fellow at Oxford University's department of psychiatry, found the orbitofrontal cortex could be a "new stimulation target" to help people suffering from anhedonia, an inability to experience pleasure from such activities. His findings are reported in the Nature Reviews Neuroscience journal.

Interestingly enough, this is not the only device of this type in development:

An electronic machine, named the Orgasmatron, taken from the 1973 Woody Allen film Sleeper, is already under development by a North Carolina doctor, who is modifying a spinal cord stimulator to produce pleasure in women.

Al Franken on the Uptake!

I've been watching the counting live in the Minnesota Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken on the Uptake for the past few days off and on and find it fascinating. As an exercise in governmental transparency it is a tremendous step forward and as pure theater it ain't half bad either. In fact, some of it has been very entertaining.

I loved the two ballots they discussed today. On one the person had voted for Al Franken, but then wrote in the write-in area the name: "Lizard People." The canvassing board then discussed if Lizard People was a real person, or a political statement. If a political statement, then the vote was for Franken; if a real person it was an over-vote. A woman on the board said how she once knew a person whose last name was People and another member asked her if their first name had been Lizard? That evoked a round of chuckles. Eventually they decided that Lizard People might be real and therefore it was an over-vote; Franken lost that one, but so did Coleman (though one might argue that Lizard People might be Coleman's species).

A few ballots later someone voted for Franken but altered his name to be Al Frankenstein. Coleman's attorney argued that this was not a vote for Al Franken and therefore should not be counted as such. Franken's attorney countered that it was obviously a vote for Franken but that the voter was just being "goofy." The board decided that they had voted for the person designated as the Democratic nominee for Senate and therefore Al Franken or Al Frankenstein were the same person.

You can't make this stuff up!

Nano Obama

This is so very, very cool!

Microscopic faces of Barack Obama made using nanotechnology, and imaged using a scanning electron microscope. Each face consists of millions of vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes, grown by a high temperature chemical reaction.

Air Blade

I spent all of yesterday at the Learning & Product Expo: Art! in Pasadena at the newly built Pasadena Conference Center. It's actually newly half-built, as the major portion of it, a large conference/convention building is still under construction. The Conference Center doesn't quite still smell like fresh paint, but it's a pretty close call on that one. It is a nice, modern building, with poorly designed access to the attached parking structure and the most modern of public restrooms.

The mens room I ventured into had hands-free flush toilets, waterless, flushless urinals, hands-free soap dispensers, hands-free faucets and hands-free, motion-activated towel dispensers. If you were not interested in the towels though, they also had one of these:



I had to try it out, so by-passed the hands-free, motion-activated towel dispenser and gingerly placed my hands into the Dyson. As I slowly pull my hands back up past the air blades they scraped the water off of my hands. Once done my hands still felt a little wet to me and maybe I pulled them too fast through the blades. Or maybe it was because I knew I was about to get pastel dust all over my hands and knew they had to be completely dry.

Even so, I think it's a pretty cool invention, certainly much better than the common hot air drier you see in other restrooms.

Question of the Day

Will our goading of Russia back into a cold war stance extend the life of the Space Shuttle? Do you think the US will want to rely on Russia for all its rides into space for five to six years?

A SLIC Time

Hewlett-Packard’s purchase of EDS this week got me thinking about my time with Electronic Data Systems, or Ed’s Bar and Grill as some of the people there called it. I was just in the process of being made a manager at Amtec Information Services when we were purchased by EDS. The manager I was replacing, Giovanni Reynaudo, was the man responsible for me getting seriously into programming.

I had been employed as an editor at Amtec (and two other names the company had gone by) for a couple of years. During that time I had become quite proficient at writing EXEC, EXEC2 and XEdit macros, not realizing that these were programs. Giovanni spotted my work and one day asked if I would be interested in working on the coding of the proprietary typographic software that our company created. I told Giovanni that I didn’t know how to program and he told me that I did, that he had seen it. Long story short here, I became a programmer by name and occupation that week and within a year Giovanni and I were neck-deep in rewriting the SLIC and SuperSLIC languages in our own images. SLIC stood for the Symbolic Language for Illustrated Composition and it was an IBM 370 Assembler Macro language that ran on a number of IBM mainframe operating systems. SuperSLIC was what we considered the ultimate format-driven generic composition system.

When I took over the lead role in developing these two products, SLIC was about 7,000 lines of Assembler code and SuperSLIC was about 12,000 lines of code on top of that. When I left the company six years later, the software had more than tripled in size, doubled in functionality and ran 20% faster than when I had started working on it. SuperSLIC had three separate macro languages imbedded inside it and when I got hold of the software these languages were a shambles of inconsistency. I removed the inconsistencies and then worked on improving all of them.

You may wonder why one program needed three macro languages and it is a good question. In reality the program could have gotten away with only two. SuperSLIC was a two-pass composition system. The first pass created composed typographic galley: lines of type, paragraphs, illustrations, footnotes, etc. The second pass placed that galley into pages. While galley creation was a pretty straightforward process, pagination was a series of trial-and-error passes, filling a column, then another, then squaring them, then backing off space for footnotes, floating blocks of text/graphics or structure changes (from say two columns to three columns, etc.), then starting the page over with the building of the first column again and over and over.

Each process had its own macro language, which were different because they did much different things and saw much different types of data. There was a second galley macro language that could do just about anything, but it was harder to use that the main macro language which we called “structured editing.” The “unstructured editing” was very powerful, but very hard to implement correctly. There was only one form of “pagination editing.”

Besides bringing consistency to the macro languages, I brought new concepts as well. I added new commands to the languages, the concept of functions, then nesting of functions and a short-hand way of declaring multiple and or sequential search values. I made sure that everything I added was done modularly, so that a new functionality could be called and used by many different areas of the program or attached to many of the new and existing commands.

At every opportunity I looked for limitations and tried to remove them. For example, the language had seven or eight different types of floating blocks. One type would appear where it was encountered or float to the top of the next page. One type would only appear at the top of the next page. One type would appear where it was encountered or float to the top of the next column (if it fit). One type would appear where it was encountered or float to the bottom of the current page. One type would only float to the bottom of the page. One type of block was hard-coded so that it would only appear at the top of a specified page. One type of block would jump in front of existing blocks waiting to be output. I took all of the logic and mapped it to a new type of super block that could perform any and all functionality. Then I exposed this new block as a new command that allowed the user to mix-and-match the floating logic. This allowed for hundreds of different types of blocks to be created by the user, yet allowed all the existing blocks to continue working as normal even though internally they were being converted to the new super block format.

I’m actually very proud of the work I did on this software and I really loved working with the 370 Assembler language which was unforgiving but elegant and straightforward in nature.

Next time I get back to this subject, I will tell you about the biggest failure of my career and the day I showed up at work and waited to be fired.

Rumble Seat

I'm going to share a secret joy with you. It's one of the things I do in my private life that provides an abundance of personal pleasure. Now there are a number of activities that might match that description, but here I am referring to reading car reviews. Shocking I know.

I am not a big auto-tech head, I don't subscribe to automobile magazines and, except for a year or so in the early 80s, I never have. I wasn't all that interested in automobile reviews until 2004. That is the year that Dan Neil of the Los Angeles Times won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. His Pulitzer citation read:

For distinguished criticism, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Awarded to Dan Neil of the Los Angeles Times for his one-of-a-kind reviews of automobiles, blending technical expertise with offbeat humor and astute cultural observations.

Technical expertise, offbeat humor and astute cultural observations? This I had to see, or rather read and since I have had a subscription to the Times since, well, forever, checking out Dan Neil proved to be quite an easy task. It also proved to be addicting as Dan is everything the Pulitzer people said he is. I offer as evidence of this a few bon mots from some recent reviews:

Suzuki SX4 Crossover--April 23, 2008

As a company, Suzuki often seems a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, stuffed into a slightly shoddy handbag that smells of cheese. On the one hand, you have the motorcycle side of the company, maker of end-times miracles such as the Hayabusa and the GSX-R. These are completely and utterly fantastic bikes, virtually without peer, especially if you like going 300 mph in first gear. The company also makes scooters, ATVs and outboard motors, and I hear they are pretty good too.

On the other hand, you have the automotive side of the business. I wonder if, given the uneven track record of American Suzuki, a busload of auto execs and a busload of Suzuki Method violin teachers somehow got switched, and now eager 5-year-olds are learning how to charge extra for undercoating.

I actually laugh out loud at this stuff.

2009 Acura TSX: bells and whistles, but no charisma--April 30, 2008

If we accept that there is something interesting about every car, then the 2009 Acura TSX tests this proposition to the breaking point. Is it well made? Are Oprah's diamond earrings real? Of course, it's well made. It's a lux'ed-up, Euro-spec Honda Accord, re-badged as an Acura and aimed at America's young and upwardly mobile petit-bourgeoisie, assuming we have any left.

Is it well equipped? Like a Chippendales show. Acura has always employed the irresistible logic of more is better. The TSX (starting at $28,960) comes standard with a big, beautiful navigation system, heated leather seats, a moonroof and plenty of other upmarket swirlies. Acura simply refuses to yield the value equation. If one of its competitors offered a device to allow telepathic communication with small rodents, you can be sure that the TSX would offer Acura's HamsterLink technology, and it would come standard with the nav system.

Is it attractive? I think the word is clinical. Rarely do you see a design that is so obviously driven by the marketers' metaphorical imperatives -- high-tech but not alienating, sleek but safe, and precisely 23.88% richer and more upmarket than the Accord. Thus the curious polished metal orthodontia in the grille. This thing has a front toof like Ollie.

Does it drive well? Absolutely. If you are benchmarking front-wheel-drive, 3,419-pound sedans with 201-hp four-cylinder engines, it drives beautifully. A deep serenity presides over the ride quality, abetted by barbiturate-like quiet and cabin isolation. Push the car a little harder into turns and, yes, you'll wish you had more steering feel -- or some -- and you'll eventually invoke the disapproval of the stability control system. But the TSX has its shoes laced up tight. Lots of traction, plenty of agility and a willingness to do as it's told that borders on slavishness.

But is the TSX interesting, compelling or unforgettable in some emotional way? Will it wake you out of a dead sleep with asphalt-gnawing desire? Will you lie and embezzle or pimp out your dog to get one? Probably not.

It's an excellent car and well worth the money. But when it comes to charisma, compared to the likes of the Mercedes-Benz C300, the Audi A4, the BMW 328i, the Acura surrenders like Lee at Appomattox.

And finally:

A BMW only a mama could love--March 19, 2008

Let's begin with a verity, an undeniable truth that is evident from 3 feet away or from the cold distance of outer space: The new 1-series BMW is ugly. Seriously ugly. Ugly with X-wings locked in attack formation. Spare me your E.H. Gombrich or Helen Gardner. I know an ugly car when one blows past me at 100 mph.

Ugly cars are unusual, for very good reasons. Auto companies are vast organizations, with billions of dollars invested, and tens of thousands of employees, some of whom can actually see to pick out their own ties. Also, in an age of computer-aided design, virtual modeling and rapid prototyping, ugly can usually be rooted out and burned at the stake before the first tooling is purchased. Usually.

My point in sharing this with you is not to piss you off because you don't have an LA Times subscription, that would be just plain mean. No, rather it is to share with you the joy of Dan Neil's writing and to let you know that you can read it on-line at this address. New reviews arrive every Wednesday,

A year ago I could not share this with you though I wanted to. The reason was the horrid state of the Los Angeles Times website. It was clunky, confusing and butt-ugly. However, with the new owners has come a new commitment to the Internet and the Times website is now a sleek and sassy joy to peruse. Check it out and you may be surprised. OK, they need to put their comics on-line, but other than that, the site is pretty damn good.

Earthrise!

It used to be only NASA provided this type of thrill from outer space, but this photo was taken by a Japanese lunar probe, and isn't it a beauty!

Sirius Buyout of XM Approved

Having recently been forced to listen to XM on a JetBlue flight and being horrified at the crappy jingles played before every song, the only thing I hope to get out of this is Air America back on Sirius like it used to be. The last thing I want is the depressingly bad music channels that infest XM.