Jul 02, 2009

Do the Time Warp Again

I have probably started four or five games of Chrono Trigger, across four or five different computers (I didn't own an SNES at the time), and never gotten past the Prehistoric Era segment. So while Square's habit of re-releasing its entire classic catalog every time a new platform reaches critical mass may seem grating and money-grubbing (probably because it is), it is sometimes valuable. The DS port of Chrono Trigger is the first time I stand a chance of finishing it. This is probably because, like a lot of adult gamers, I use portable games as a way of multitasking. It's something I can pull out if a movie or TV show starts to drag but I still want to see the end, as well as a time-killer during the inevitable Metro delays. And while I've always got games loaded on a smartphone of some kind these days, it's rarely as satisfying as the experience on an actual console--not to mention that the battery life is far better. So compared to the emulated versions, I've gotten much farther this time around.

Chrono Trigger is almost fifteen years old now, which is pretty amazing if you think about it. It's held up well. More than that: I'd argue that it's better than most anything Square's put out during the intervening years, on either portable or home console. Mostly this is because it's such a lean design: unlike the excesses the company developed in the 32-bit era, there are no collectible card games (FF8) or watersports (FF10) that you have to learn to navigate, and the battle system is relatively simple. It feels like this left the development team free to concentrate on the worldbuilding: the result is a series of rich, often comical time periods linked to each other by a decidedly quirky kind of causality. Great characters, as well, although I'm not the biggest fan of the art style.

Although the game isn't non-linear, it's also impressive how well it fakes it. Shuffle the party as much as you want, they'll all still have appropriate dialog choices (some more appropriate than others, granted). Halfway through, it opens up a whole bunch of sidequests that players can approach in any order. The experience is still basically guided at every step, but in a way that feels empowering and entirely in sync with the time travel theme: at practically any point in the game, players can jump straight to the final boss, although they'll probably get creamed if they haven't done at least a few of the optional missions.

If anything has not aged well about the game, it's the mechanics of the battle system--more specifically, the endlessly frustrating menu options that must be navigated under pressure. At the time, this was how RPGs worked--hell, it's how a lot of them still work today. For a short time, Square seemed to have chafed a bit under that convention: FF6 (released a year before Chrono Trigger) supplemented the menus with oddball conventions like Sabin's Street Fighter-esque combos, while Super Mario RPG went to a far more manageable system of assigning different actions to the largely-unused face buttons. Then the Playstation rolled around, and the company apparently gave up on control innovation and concentrated on putting elaborate CG movies in between boring menus.

In the meantime, it cannot be stressed how annoying Chrono Trigger's menus are, especially since by default they let enemies continue to attack while you try and find the right $%!@-ing Dual Tech. I particularly love hunting for a single healing item through a vast inventory list using a tiny little window, during which time monsters have probably managed to kill the character I wanted to heal in the first place. Once upon a time, this was called "adding tension," but looking back on it, it's a lot like trying to solve sudoku while someone shoots you with a BB gun: a synthesis of tedium and tension that I could personally do very much without. The DS port of Chrono Trigger "solves" this problem by making the same menus into big, touch-friendly targets, which utterly fails to help. It may feel like a blow to your hardcore gamer cred, but I'd recommend switching from "Active" to "Wait" mode instead.

All in all, though, Chrono Trigger's an example of Doing It Right. If everything Square had made was this good, as opposed to say every Final Fantasy except for 6, it probably wouldn't be so galling to see them regurgitate the whole lot every time a marketable piece of hardware came out. There's even a theoretical justification for their actions: even more than other digital artifacts, console games age badly as the march to new platforms and formats makes them difficult--or even impossible--to play them as they should be played, and clearly emulation doesn't always cut it. In theory, I don't begrudge the company for reselling the classics, even if it is just locking them to a newer block of soon-to-be-obselete hardware. In practice, however, the only thing worse than watching them repackage both the good and the awful is watching all of it sell like hotcakes.

Jun 29, 2009

Digital Bookshelf: No Hero Edition

I'm not sure what the cause has been--lower margins on hardware, higher-than-expected bandwidth costs, simple greed--but Amazon has stealthily raised the prices at which they introduce books to the Kindle store. A lot of the new releases that I'd like to be reading (The Bloggers on the Bus, for example, or In the Land of Invented Languages) are priced at around $14. This still puts them at roughly $3 cheaper than Amazon's price for the printed version (plus shipping or Prime membership), but it's a $4 increase over the bestseller pricing at the device's introduction.

Although I should probably get over it--I didn't buy the Kindle for the discounts, after all--I have trouble bringing myself to pay the new, higher prices. As a result, it can be difficult sometimes to find new books to read. For all that Amazon's done, including the essential sample functionality, the Kindle store is still not always a great way to browse for new books--the recommendations are often titles that I've already read, or that I would never read (Laurell K. Hamilton, for example, less for the romance and more because vampires give me the willies). What I often end up doing is going to a physical bookstore, wandering the shelves, and taking pictures of books I want to download later. This is not exactly efficient.

In any case, here are some quick takes on my reading for the last couple months:

Charlie Huston's The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death wins the prize for longest title in this batch, I think. It falls neatly into the modern detective caper genre, where the protagonist is less a highly-capable PI solving a case and more a sad-sack just trying to extricate him- or herself from a series of unfortunate coincidences. Huston's book centers on Webster Goodhue, an ex-teacher who self-destructs after a bus accident, and gradually hauls himself out of depression via work in the field of crime-scene cleanup. As pulp goes, Mystic Arts is pretty good: the dialog is snappy, the plot wanders unpredictably, and everything is wrapped up neatly at the end. If I had to criticize, I'd say that the romantic plot thread seems a bit strained, but that's picking nits, really.

While Huston's book is a good example of modern pulp/noir, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a throwback to more classic thrillers. The last book written by Swedish author Stieg Larsson before his death, it follows a discredited journalist hired by a rich industry magnate to investigate the decades-old disappearance of his niece. The case unfolds with the help of a young, female computer hacker, who also serves as the hook for the novel's theme: a polemic against domestic violence in Sweden. As potboilers go, it's acceptable, and the Swedish setting makes a nice change of scenery for American readers, but ultimately it's a disposable piece of pop literature with slightly elevated aspirations.

Also planted firmly in its genre is Blood Engines by Tim Pratt. In this case, it's the new urban fantasy, in which various mythical figures are transplanted onto real-world locations. Pratt does a decent job with yet another Strong Female Wizard, but it's not going to knock anyone's socks off. For me, what was most distracting about it was the way it seemed like a book from the middle of a series while actually being the first, perhaps due to the way Pratt's clumsy expository style. I may pick up some of the other books if I'm bored, but I doubt I'll seek them out if I can find anything else. On the other hand, this one is free on Kindle as a promotional deal, so it wouldn't hurt other Kindle readers to check it out.

Here's an example of the poor recommendation system at work: I'd have never heard of Chris Braak's The Translated Man if John Rogers hadn't written it up, even though it fits neatly into my Weird Fiction niche. It's a murder mystery set in a kind of steampunk Victoriana mold, with forbidden math equations and Frankenstein wannabes--a little bit New Crobuzon, a little bit H.G. Wells. It's cheap, too.

Kevin Roose's The Unlikely Disciple is a better book than it deserves to be. As an undergraduate, he spent a semester undercover at Liberty University, just to see what it was like. The results are predictable ("Fundamentalists are people too!"), but Roose has a deft, casual voice that's generally enjoyable to read. He also writes honestly about the changes in his own habits as the Liberty culture influences him, which readers may find disturbing or comforting, depending on their perspective. Toward the middle, the book drags as he spends a bit too much time introspecting on the dilemmas of undergraduate psychology, but it picks up again at the end when Jerry Falwell, Liberty's founder, dies, and Roose turns out to have done the last public interview with the man.

If nothing else, Drood is a fine argument for the phsyical advantages of the Kindle--the original is a lengthy 784 pages. Written by Dan Simmons (author of the historical Arctic thriller The Terror), it poses as a secret diary by Wilkie Collins, writer and friend of Charles Dickens who has been overshadowed by his contemporaries. Collins tells a story about Charles Dickens and a creepy, corpse-like figure named Drood, who recruits the famous author to write his autobiography through a combination of blackmail and hypnosis. Of course, Collins is himself a highly-unreliable narrator, being an opium addict and highly jealous of Dickens' gifts. Simmons can write, that's for sure, but his examination of jealous and ego is desparately in need of editing: Drood drags on and on, and when it finally ends the force of the big reveal has been blunted by the sheer length of it all.

Simmons, of course, has a history of strong beginnings and disappointing extensions, a trait shared by Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogy: Mistborn, The Well of Ascension, and The Hero of Ages. The first book is a relatively fresh fantasy caper (with magic powered by ingested metals) that's fun as long as you don't think about it too closely. After that, Sanderson indulges in some serious world-building, none of which is nearly as interesting--or unexpected--as he thinks it is. I'm admittedly biased: Sanderson is yet another Mormon fantasy author, and as soon as I found that out, I found myself watching for telltale injections of doctrine. Worse, I found them. As with Simmons' Hyperion books, I'd recommend reading just the first title and then pretending that the rest don't exist.

At some point, post-Watchmen movie I'd guess, I downloaded Who Can Save Us Now?, an anthology of superhero short stories edited by Owen King. As with most short-story collections, it's pretty hit or miss. Part of the problem, honestly, is that I think superheroes are probably pretty much mined-out for subtext--indeed, part of the problem is that their subtext was shallow enough to be the text itself. As a result, there's a few "stupid superhero power" stories, a couple of "superpowers where you don't expect them" stories, and some straight superhero fiction, none of which is very compelling. The standout, in my opinion, is the opening piece by Stephanie Harrell titled "Girl Reporter." It's a compact meditation on public relations, power, and the unfortunate role of Lois Lane in the superhero fantasy.

I said, when doing a capsule review of Adam Troy-Castro's Emissaries from the Dead about a year back, that I'd happily pick up a sequel--and here it is. The Third Claw of God again centers on Andrea Cort, child war criminal and intersteller lawyer, for another murder mystery IN SPACE. What I find amusing about this book--indeed, about a lot of future noir, including Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs books--is how conventional they are in many ways. By this I mean that if you got rid of the space-elevator setting, or the cybernetically-linked lovers, what you've got in The Third Claw is essentially an Agatha Christie one-room mystery. This book is strongest in the middle, when those elements are most present, and weakest at the beginning and end, when Troy-Castro lays the groundwork for the multi-book meta-plot. I wish he'd stick more with the one-shot storylines: the world doesn't particularly need another grand space opera, and I suspect it won't play to his strengths.

And finally, Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation finally showed up on Kindle this year. I highly recommend it, even to those who are not hip-hop fans (I'm not, really). Chang's gone back to primary sources in order to draw a line from the historical roots of the movement, its four pillars (rap, DJing, b-boying, and graffiti), and its shift from social consciousness to big business. Probably about as good an overview as anyone could hope for, clearly written by someone who has deep affection for the art form.

Jun 25, 2009

Own Your Name

When Facebook recently announced that users would be getting their own human-readable usernames and corresponding URLs, Anil Dash linked back to his 2002 piece, Privacy through Identity Control:

...if you do a simple Google search on my name, what do you get? This site.

I own my name. I am the first, and definitive, source of information on me.

One of the biggest benefits of that reality is that I now have control. The information I choose to reveal on my site sets the biggest boundaries for my privacy on the web. Granted, I'll never have total control. But look at most people, especially novice Internet users, who are concerned with privacy. They're fighting a losing battle, trying to prevent their personal information from being available on the web at all. If you recognize that it's going to happen, your best bet is to choose how, when, and where it shows up.

It was good advice then, and it's good advice now. It's especially good advice for people in my field, new media and online journalism. Own your name: buy the domain, set up a simple splash page or a set of redirection links, or go all out and create a rarely-updated work portfolio. But leaving your Internet shadow up to chance is simply not an option for us anymore.

Here's an example: This week, I got an e-mail in my work inbox from someone who wants to work for us. Well, actually, he's interested in "pitching ideas for new online projects," and he has "a Logline Synopsis and a variety of treatments ready to send upon request." What he doesn't provide is links to any past work, or any hints as to what he wants to do. That's his first mistake: this isn't Hollywood, it's the Internet. We don't want your pitches, we want links and examples, and anyone who doesn't understand that probably isn't someone with whom we want to build online projects.

But it's possible, for very small values of possible, that someone who is aware of all Internet traditions would forget about the humble link, or would be wary of releasing their revolutionary ideas into the wild without keeping them under tight control. So I did what any prospective employer would have done: typed the applicant's name into Google.

The very first link--I kid you not, the first and only link for this guy's name--was a YouTube entry labeled "demo reel" by a username very similar to the applicant's e-mail address. Contained inside were five minutes of poorly-cut, VHS-quality video seemingly from a college TV station, focusing mainly on fratboy humor like asking groups of girls embarrassing sexual questions and being punched in the groin (not at the same time, unfortunately). As far as the Internet is concerned, that's Applicant X's identity. Think he'll get any response on his pitches for "new online projects?"

If you work in a fairly traditional job, or even a low-intensity information technology job, a minimal online presence--maybe even through something like a LinkedIn or Facebook URL--is probably fine. But if, like me, your job is to make digital content (of any variety) specifically for the Internet, you need to do more than that. You need to own your name.

Jun 24, 2009

The Rat

The carpenter's union in DC is very active, with regular protests around the Golden Triangle, but you don't see them bring The Rat out much. Maybe it's hard to find parking for him.

I like that he seems to have jumped up onto the hybrid in his rage, causing the hood and hatchback to fly open as he crushes it under his massive, scabby feet. It's like a scene from Michael Bay's remake of The Rats of N.I.M.H.

Jun 23, 2009

Rocked Out

Rock Band was actually the reason that we bought the XBox. Belle and I have a soft spot for gimmicky party attractions. Somehow, we forgot that we also have a neurotic, overprotective pit bull mutt. They don't really mix, and we kept putting off our plans. This weekend, we finally bit the bullet, boarded the dog, and brought the noise.

Watching people play for the first time, particularly people who are not A) incredibly extroverted or B) experienced gamers, was interesting. They were usually put on the drums, under the reasonable logic that hitting things is fun, and everyone was pretty much on Easy, because failing a song is not fun (the primacy of fun may be a debated topic in design circles, but when people are drinking it's not really an option). When the song first starts, the newbie would have an expression of utter panic--hitting the pad too late, bewildered by the number of notes coming in, only using one stick--and then, all of a sudden, there'd be this ah-hah! moment and they'd get it.

The speed of that jump between dread to drumming is so quick, in fact, that I've been trying to figure out the cause in the couple of days since. My best guess is that it comes from the realization that you're not just hitting buttons when they cross the bottom of the screen, but that you're playing in time with the music--the onscreen action is actually kind of a miscue. Once new players make that conceptual leap, the rest is a cakewalk. Which begs the question: the "highway o' notes" approach has become so standard that experienced gamers don't question it, but could it be the weakest part of the modern rhythm game? How else could we visualize a musical score without resorting to actual notation?

Once they sat down and got the hang of things, I think people enjoyed themselves. But there's certainly a karaoke factor--nobody wants to be the first to act like an idiot in front of everyone. You have to have a few Judas goats get things started with a couple of songs--the cheesier the better--before people will start to jump in. And even so, I think reports of the game's universal appeal may be a little presumptuous. And that's okay: it's a party, not an enforced Rock Band prison camp.

Not yet, anyway. I'm thinking of training Wallace to be the Fun Enforcer. If he's so set on biting people, we might as well channel it into a useful direction. And snarling madly at the end of a short leash while I shriek "more fun! MORE FUN!" sounds like a good party starter. For me, at least.

Jun 19, 2009

Symlinks

I feel like all links are symbolic of something, personally.

• The executive producer for Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles wrote up a blog entry on cancelation, office spaces, and the trunk check. Coming from someone who liked the show: if it had been consistently as well-written as that post, it might still be on the air.
• Hackaday has some notes on Slow Loris, a denial-of-service attack that only requires one computer and doesn't use a flood. Seems like you could fix it on the server side, though. It's not a new kind of attack--I'm surprised it still works.
• On the topic of security, Patrick Meier has been writing some really good stuff lately. Check out his guide to communicating securely in repressive environments and his review of How to Lie with Maps.
• Laptops and Appropriate Technology is a post about XO laptops by a teacher in Malawi. An interesting read, even for a cranky skeptic like myself.
• Libertarians on Boats: The Saga Continues. You know, I mock these guys a lot, but there's something impressive about the amount of coverage they get. For all the articles that are written, you'd think it was some kind of vast movement across the entire libertarian party--but then you actually read further, and it's really just the same small group every time, somehow always just thiiiiis close to their seasteading paradise. Until next time, guys.
• So we are holding a Rock Band party this weekend, which is cause for much excitement. But it's also cause for consternation: where do you get the second guitar, so people can play bass and mock my real-life instrumentation? I'm sure they're very nice, but spare instruments for the game are $80, which (plus the cost of boarding an over-excitable dog) is really more than I wanted to spend. But once you start looking into borrowing, the market segmentation really becomes a hassle: not only do music games fail to play nicely with each other, but you can't use controllers from the same game on different consoles. My friends with the PS2 version wouldn't have any place to plug in. Apparently even the USB microphone isn't cross-platform. Finally, we found someone who knew someone else with an XBox 360 guitar. The heavens opened, and the faint sounds of Iron Maiden could once again be heard.
• One of the amazing things about Stephen Colbert's act is that he almost never breaks character. Talking Points Memo has a clip of him backstage with John Kerry a couple of years ago. It's bizarre just to see him talking softly.
• 15 Travel Tips for Africa, or anywhere really.

Jun 17, 2009

Unity Is the Problem

There's been a cycle between client-server and peer-to-peer as long as there have been computers. We've been stuck in the former for a while now, as AJAX and web browsers became the new "thin clients." Opera's newly-announced Unite technology is a hint that we might be swinging back: it embeds a JavaScriptable web server into the browser, turning the thin client into a server as well. Opera hopes this'll be a return to the ideals of a decentralized, peer-to-peer web. I don't know personally if they'll be the ones to do it--we're talking about a company with an x86 market share that's practically a rounding error outside of Europe--but I think it's an exciting move in the right direction. Mostly.

Granted, Opera's not the first company to try this. They're not even the first Scandinavians to do it: I wrote a while back about Nokia's Mobile Web Server, which does something very similar using a dynamic DNS service and ports of Apache and Python to S60. It's kind of funny, actually: even when I wrote that post, I thought a lot of the applications I proposed--data collection apps, location-aware multimedia blogs, peer-to-peer REST APIs--might be a little far-fetched. Now you could practically drop my post into Opera's Unite pitch without changing anything other than the brand names. It'd blend right in.

Given my interest in digital activism, the first thing that came to mind was the usefulness of this technology for dissidents. Sadly, Unite suffers from the same problems as most Web 2.0 communication technologies: its idea of decentralization, isn't. In repressive environments, that makes it potentially vulnerable.

Opera claims that Unite is decentralized--and it is, to a certain degree. In theory it moves user data away from repositories like Facebook and Flickr, and leaves them on your individual machine. But in reality, Unite simply moves the centralization into the network channel itself. Despite the claim of creating an "interpersonal web," the service doesn't actually connect users to each other directly. Instead, to handle the problem of addressing dynamic servers, as well as providing some degree of security, all Unite traffic goes through Opera's proxy servers and is routed to its actual destination.

Having a proxy server, of course, is not a bad idea. For activists it might even make a lot of sense: it adds a layer of obfuscation, and means that the data server can't immediately be physically located via its IP address. And Opera has a lot of experience in proxy technology: its Java-based Opera Mini browser provides a fantastic web experience on resource-constrained devices by running page requests through a proxy that compresses them. I don't use it for anything secure, but it's astonishing how much faster it is for basic reading compared to a full Webkit mobile client. Opera probably also has a way to monetize the Unite accounts required to use its service, and which serve as the subdomains for users.

In a repressive environment, however, this strategy is disastrous. Take China, for example: you may have heard that a few weeks ago, on the anniversary of the Tiananmen protests, China simply shut down Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and a number of other social networking tools. For all its talk of decentralization, Opera Unite could be shut down just as easily, simply by blocking access to unite.opera.com. Suddenly that "interpersonal" web collapses. Likewise, if anything goes wrong--or if Opera caved to governmental demands--any traffic moving between Unite servers through their proxy would be vulnerable. So much for security.

Granted, not every regime is as competent--or as concerned--as China when it comes to ICT. We're all aware of how Twitter (among others) has become a part of communication in and out of Iran. Why hasn't it been shut down? As Evgeny Morozov argues, it may simply be a matter of priorities: when you've got real riots in the streets, riots on a microblog service probably seem relatively inconsequential--probably are relatively inconsequential, being more useful for publicizing protests than for actually organizing them. My cynical side also notes that (if they've thought about it this far) Iranian authorities may see an advantage in allowing the rest of the world to see this as a dramatic electoral struggle, rather than merely a dispute between two Shah-chosen figureheads--but then I know nothing about Iran, and you should certainly take my opinion with a ton of salt.

Despite my doubts, I think a Unite-ish system could be very useful for activists if combined with a user-run proxy system. It makes information dissemination flexible, simple, and mobile: as easy as sitting down near a wireless hotspot and opening up a browser. Adding some kind of discovery mechanism for the proxy--maybe via a distributed, browser-based darknet--or a process for spamming its location to blogs/e-mail/messaging when online would make this a powerful way for activists to share their data without giving up ownership to a third party. There's no reason Opera themselves couldn't lead the way on this, based on what they've done with Unite so far--but it looks unlikely.

Jun 15, 2009

A Surprising Depth

This weekend, the total number of posts on Twitter exceeded the possible range of a 32-bit number--

...hang on a second, and let's marvel at the sheer size of that. It is easy to forget that a 32-bit number is actually mind-bogglingly huge, since hey, there's only 32 bits. Remember, however, that bits are like the pennies on the chessboard in that old mind-teaser: each one doubles the size of the digit before it. So in binary, you may start out counting 1, 2, 4, 8... but by the time you hit your 16th bit the total is 65,536 and it just keeps doubling from there. 32 binary digits is enough to encode more than 4 billion: 4,294,967,295, to be exact. Even in the signed integer format Twitter uses, which reserves one bit for negative numbers, it's still more than 2 billion. That's a lot of work for only 32 bits.

Anyway! So the service passed the 2,147,483,649 mark this weekend with, hilariously, a post claiming ungrammatically that "The Tweets must flow" and linking to a lolcat--

...sorry, I have to make another digression here regarding the terminology in question. There's a widespread idea, encouraged by Twitter itself, that updates should be referred to as "tweets." This is, pardon my curmudgeonliness, really stupid. First of all, Twitter is nothing more than a microblog, and we already have a term for the basic units of a blog: we call them posts. Where Twitter primarily diverges from something like Blogspot is only in the speed and hothouse intensity of its ecosystem, and you can even see examples of this in people who write both long-form blogging and Twitter. The kind of person, for example, who writes polished, slightly-pretentious management advice on his or her blog will also tend to write polished, highly pretentious posts on Twitter. In my own case, it's more of a sidechannel for links and petty commentary, but the voice is not radically different.

For another thing: just because it's the Internet, you don't have to leave all your dignity at the door. "Tweets?" Really? Do you know how embarrassing that sounds, like when you're in the middle of an editorial meeting, and a bunch of middle-aged journalists start talking about the tweets they've written lately? Because I do, and it'll turn your hair white.

Right! Back on topic: Twitter passed the 32-bit overflow mark this weekend. Doing so is not just a landmark number, it's also a potential bug for Twitter clients coded to use only a 32-bit integer in their data structures. Of course, such clients are relatively rare: modern high-level programming languages often express their numbers in 64-bit formats (the range of which I find almost incomprehensibly vast). But older languages, such as C++ and Java, may default to 32-bit integers unless told otherwise--I remember learning them as "long" integers, which says a lot about the progress that we've made. Coders these days should know better than to use the int type for something like a Twitter post ID, but it's an easy mistake to make.

Sure enough, a few clients did not handle the overflow well. On the iPhone, Twitterrific began to crash for people. My favorite Android client, Twit2Go, also threw exceptions when it went to retrieve posts. I like Twit2Go quite a bit (it's fast and acts like a real Android app, with good long-press and menu-button behavior), so this was annoying.

But it was also an interesting study in distribution methods. The developer of Twit2Go started working on the problem on Saturday morning, soon after the problem surfaced. Five hours later, he uploaded the fixed version to the Android market, and it was immediately available for users. The developers of Twitterrific, IconFactory, were actually on the job even earlier: a Friday post on the company blog noted the bug, including details about a previous update that, unfortunately, had not caught all the errors. At 6PM on Saturday (almost exactly the same time as Twit2Go), IconFactory submitted an update to the App Store that fixed the remaining bugs. As of this moment, the free version has only made it through to end users this morning, and the paid version is still in approval limbo. Drama ensued.

The problem overwhelmingly faced by open platform advocates is that abstract dilemmas are hard to transfer into mainstream, non-geek experience. Try discussing DRM with the average person, or explaining the "shallow bugs" principle to them, and watch eyes glaze over faster than Krispy Kreme. But this is a great, easy-to-translate example of the walled garden problem: because control is centralized and accountability is non-existent, paying customers have been unable to use updated software for two days now, for no other reason than the arbitrary whims of a large corporation. No appeals, no alternatives.

To sum up: "binary numbers are very large, think twice before coining a neologism, and make sure you own your hardware." Not a bad range of topics for a service with a 140-character limit, but I suspect it lacks flavor by comparison. As usual, it's more interesting to write about Twitter than to write something interesting using it.

The Planet and Its Hacks

A pro-environment, climate science editorial in the Wall Street Journal? It's probably a shock to them as well, but Jamais Cascio writes this week about the case for geoengineering. He argues that geoengineering--the process of intentionally altering the planet's climate to counteract global warming--is necessary to buy time for long-term adjustment plans, even though it will have unpredictable environmental and political side effects.

Of course, being the Wall Street Journal, the comments are a roiling hotbed of climate denialism. Reactions to Cascio's article include the implication that the WSJ is playing a prank on its readers by making up a San Francisco-based environmental futurist with a French first name, possibly at the behest of (I kid you not) George Soros. There are also gems like "I've spent most of my life on Planet Earth and venture out into the 'environment' almost every day. I have yet to notice any sort of crisis out there." Indeed: such compelling evidence will no doubt be collected in the IPCC's newest report, tentatively titled "My Back Yard: I Ain't Seen Nothin', Ya Crazy Hippies."

The irony of these comments is that they're the reason that geoengineering is even being considered in the first place. As Cascio writes, it has moved from the fringes to the semi-mainstream simply because policy-makers have failed to respond strongly to global warming, even as the problem has worsened (most recently, a study at MIT found that warming could reach double the levels previously thought over the next century). And a significant cause of the sluggishness on the part of governments is the hue and cry from denialists who have fought tooth and nail against climate action.

But perhaps, if nothing else, this is the reason to get geoengineering out into the public debate: it moves the conversation forward. Compared to, say, dumping millions of tons of sulfur into the atmosphere as a cooling mechanism, a carbon cap and trade scheme looks a lot more moderate--and hopefully, a lot more achievable.

Jun 10, 2009

It Ain't Broke

"You're a tinkerer," the IT guy says to me.

This is not entirely a compliment. I've just been describing how I had to hard-reset my phone yesterday, after a botched process involving root access, the application caches, and the Android marketplace. It was entirely my own fault, mind you, and completely predictable. Almost a week between purchase and the first reformat? For me, that is superhuman restraint.

The IT guy would probably appreciate this more if he didn't spend his workday cleaning up other people's computer messes, to the point where it's not terribly amusing any more. But he's not having to clean up mine, so instead he just tells me that I'm a tinkerer, in the same tone of voice that most people would say "oh, you're a chemical weapons engineer" or "oh, you have rabies." That's interesting, the tone says, maybe you could tell me more about it from a little further away.

I don't mind. I'm reminded of something Lance Mannion wrote about the his Uncle Merlin and the "tinker unit" a couple of years back:

Changing a light bulb, caulking a window, nailing down a loose floorboard on the deck, hanging a picture---these are all acts of puttering.

Tinkering is the self-directed, small but skillful, not necessarily necessary work of actual home repair and improvement. There's an experimental quality to tinkering, as well. When you sit down---or kneel down, squat down, or lie down and crawl under something---to tinker, you don't always know exactly what you're going to do. You're going to try something to see if it does the trick.

Tinkering includes the possibility of using a screwdriver, a wrench, or a pair of pliers, possibly even a voltage meter, and preferably all four. To putter, you might need a screwdriver, but usually you can get the job done with a hammer or a paintbrush.

If you go out to the garage to spray some WD-40 on the tracks of your squeaky garage door, you're puttering. If you install a new automatic garage door opener, you're tinkering.

Changing the oil on your car is a putter. Installing new belts and hoses, especially if the car doesn't really need new belts and hoses yet, is a tinker.

Pouring a new garage floor or rebuilding the car's engine are serious jobs that the words tinker and putter don't begin to describe.

I just changed the filter on our furnace. That was a putter.

But the furnace has been a bit balky the last couple of days and even refused to kick on last night until I went downstairs to tinker with it. I checked the filter, saw that I'd need to change it in the morning---Note: The label on the filter says 30 Day Filter and it means what it says---but for the moment all I could do was pluck dust off it and shake dirt out of it. I put new duct tape around the joints on the outtake pipes. Tripped the circuit breaker a few times. Heard a small, sad click and then an ominous and disheartening silence from the furnace. Went upstairs to re-read the troubleshooting guide in the manual. Heard the burners ignite at last, closed the manual, and went to bed, congratulating myself on a job well done.

That was tinkering.

He's talking about home repair and I'm talking a kind of generalized electronic interference, but they're the same thing. It's the "not necessarily necessary" part that links them. Tinkering is less about problems, more about projects and potential.

Affinity for tinkering is one way to sort the population, I think. Some people get it, some people don't. Belle is one of the ones who doesn't. She has learned to dread those times when a home purchase suggestion is met with the response "oh, we could just make one of those." She also watches with amusement when I find a new project--such as, a couple of weeks ago, when I decided to make a case for my old phone, since the one I'd been using was falling apart. I wanted one of those magnetic cases, but the ones for Blackberries are too short, and the ones that aren't too short are so wide that the phone would slide back and forth and drive me batty.

No problem, I said, and I dragged her to the fabric store, where I bought some jean rivets. Then I found one of the too-short cases online for a couple of bucks (plus shipping and handling, still a deal!), snipped the leather clasp in two, and used the rivets and a part of the old case to extend it just far enough to close around the Nokia. It was my first time riveting something. I really enjoyed it, and said so. Belle rolled her eyes at me.

To some extent, I can understand where she's coming from, since I've been there myself. My family also tends to be hands-on, which makes me suspect that it may be an inherited (or at least acquired) trait, and it's certainly a lot less fun to be involved in someone else's tinkering. Which is not to say that it holds no rewards: my dad recently sold one of his kayaks, and the buyer specifically requested the one with the nose art.

My goal lately has not been to eliminate tinkering, but to make sure it's channeled in productive directions. For example, one of my regular projects has been upgrading the video drivers on my laptop--I'm always seduced by the thought of a few more frames per second, or a slightly-smoother game of Team Fortress 2. Invariably, this has become a mistake: while the early Lenovo drivers might have been a bit buggy, at this point they've pretty much caught up to the hacked releases, and all I get for my trouble is a long night of restoring backups and rebooting. Better just to leave it alone, or at least find less tedious things to disrupt.

The nice thing about digital tinkering, as opposed to the home infrastructure kind, is that there are ways nowadays to make sure that all you lose is time. That's part of the reason I love mobile platforms and virtual machines: in both cases, mess something up and all you've lost is less than an hour, most of which is just restoring from the default image. If only there were a way to say the same for our apartment, since then I wouldn't have a large packet of rivets, a Dremel tool, a box of half-disassembled guitar pedals, and several yards of unused vinyl lying around.

Or maybe I just need the right project for them. Any ideas?

Future - Present - Past