O'Reilly Digital Media

Recently I wrote an article complaining about how so much high tech music gear almost seems designed to disrupt flow. I used flow in the sense defined by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (”Mee-high Chik-sent-mee-high”): the blissful experience of egoless, timeless absorption in your work. Csikszentmihalyi says it may well represent the pinnacle of human happiness, and I think many would agree. I pointed out many instances where flow succumbed to confusing interfaces, unpredictable behavior and the like.
But after griping about failures so much in that article, I’ve been thinking that there really is a need to recognize successes. So I propose the establishment of:
The Flow Awards. These will be given by an Academy Of Users in honor of technology (musical or otherwise) that supports flow. So far, the Flow Awards Academy is me. And in the spirit of flow, I’d like to get things rolling by handing out the first one.
And the first ever Flow goes to…
Masterwriter songwriting software, a great tool that has quickly become standard issue among songwriters, including Jimmy Webb, Jeffrey Steele, Rob Thomas and Trent Reznor.
Songwriting software? When I first heard about Masterwriter, I was very skeptical. After all, beyond some talent and a lot of work, good songwriting only requires a pencil and paper, and maybe a rhyming dictionary. I assumed that software was likely to be just technological frippery, especially given that paper is really hard to beat in terms of speed and usability, and given that Mastwriter’s list price is $289, though you can get it for quite a lot less through some songwriters’ organizations, such as ASCAP, The Muse’s Muse or Nashville Songwriters Association International.
But the Masterwriter people wisely promote a free trial. And to try is to be sold.
Masterwriter was created by composer (”Nadia’s Theme”, “Theme From S.W.A.T.”), producer and publisher (The Association, Tamerlane Music) Barry DeVorzon. It includes a lot of useful features, including a MIDI loop player and an audio recorder for capturing ideas quickly as you work, plus the optional ability to upload your work to an online vault for storage and (unofficial) copyright protection. But the instant clincher for me was simply this: the ability to search for rhymes much faster than you can using any paper-based rhyming dictionary. For example, let’s say you need a rhyme for “flow”. Highlight “flow” in your lyric and click the Rhymes button:

Instantly you go to a screen of possible rhymes:

It’s such a simple feature, but it gets to the essence of flow: It’s so responsive that it makes almost no demands on your conscious mind. In the few seconds you save, you avoid what can often be a fatal interruption, since while you’re paging for rhymes in a paper rhyming dictionary, you’re likely to start thinking about the fact that you’re writing a song. And as soon as you do that, your non-creative self-consciousness has a chance to take over and start its usual thing of splashing around in your flow, anxiously asking How am I doing? How am I doing?
You can also filter the rhymes in a few different ways, as you’ll see by looking under “Rhyme Categories” to the left in the image above. “Primary” will display the most likely rhymes, omitting choices like faux, throe and chapeau. But if you’re the cussed type, “Secondary” will display only the less likely choices. “Pop Culture” is an innovative feature that displays rhyming pop culture phrases such as HBO, The Late Show and Lake Ontario. (I’m a little unclear about the pop culture role of Lake Ontario - did I miss something?) “Sound-Alikes” gives you near rhymes, as in right and like.
Now some might say that using any rhyming dictionary is a cheat, though I don’t know of any pro songwriters who feel that way. It’s true that a lot of dull songs do get written by people who use a rhyming dictionary unimaginatively, along such lines as When I saw you tonight/You know you made me feel right/blah-blah-blah sight/blah-blah-blah light/etc. But when used with an open mind, a rhyming dictionary is an I Ching-like source of inspiration, often leading you to discover ideas you’d never arrive at logically. If I were to continue my Flow song using Masterwriter, I might quickly come up with an obvious rhyme for I’m gonna let it flow such as I’m gonna follow this river wherever it goes…
But I might also be led down more imaginative routes by words like dobro:
Like a bottleneck sliding on an old dobro…
or row: The motor just quit, but I ain’t gonna row…
or scarecrow: I’m gonna let it flow/I’ve been taking life lessons from an old scarecrow/Let the wind in the wheat go wherever it goes/I’m gonna let it flow…
Hmmm… I think I can work with that…
Simply by making it easier and faster to make such little discoveries, I think Masterwriter is worth every bit of the $200 or so I paid for it. And it’s more than worthy, assuming we agree such a thing now exists, of a Flow Award.

What technology would you nominate for a Flow?

Since I work as a systems/network admin, much of my day is spent either building new systems or doing maintenance on existing ones. Like most places, we rely on different types of monitoring software to keep us apprised of system performance.

One such system is Cacti, which we have implemented recently and really like. It uses Apache, PHP, MySQL and RRDTool, generates performance graphs for lots of networks and systems, and is so dead easy to use compared to our previous system using MRTG and RRDTool, that I don’t know how we worked without it.

Consequently, I’ve spent a lot of time in the last two months with a web browser window open in Cacti, either passively monitoring a graph, or adding new ones. We’re bringing on lots of new DSL customers so I have been adding new graphs on a daily basis.

What I’ve discovered is that Safari is a horribly written browser, and that it is totally unusable for the simple function of opening a page, displaying it, and letting me click from page to page inside Cacti.

The first problem I encountered was with Safari 1.2 and 1.3 under Mac OS X 10.3. Safari 10.2 would take forever to open a page with lots of data in Cacti. For example, when you add a new device to Cacti, it does an SNMP query and shows you all of the available interfaces it can graph. On our router that terminates DSL customers, this is several hundred interfaces. Safari 1.2 totally choked on this page. I’d get the spinning beach ball of death, and would eventually have to kill the browser entirely.

Safari 1.3 that came with OS X 10.3.9 was even worse. This data-intensive page would simply cause the browser to crash totally after about 30 seconds. Also Safari 1.3 would crash if I had more than two SSL pages open.

Safari 2.0 in Tiger doesn’t have the crashing problems described above, but it still takes the browser somewhere on the order of 5 minutes to display the page with hundreds of interfaces. During that time the browser is unusable with the spinning beach ball.

The killer problem that I just noticed today is that Safari positively EATS memory. I was working in Cacti, and noticed that my system had really slowed to a crawl. The browser window took forever to update, and I had a lot of disk activity. I fired up top and WHOA! I only have 2M of free RAM and the system is swapping like mad.

Safari was taking up 216M of RSIZE memory in top. That’s half of my system total! Again, this is a single web site. I have a single window open, at this time displaying a list of 25 graphs which I was editing one at a time.

216M of RAM! What on earth are you doing to me, Apple?

I started up Firefox. Worked for a while on the same page, same tasks, about the same amount of time. Opened more tabs. Watched top in the background, and Firefox slowly went from 32M after opening, to fluctuating between 36 and 40M depending on how many windows I had open.

I’m sorry, Apple, but your browser just sucks.

Does Safari suck for you too?

…Wait, no, try it again.
…OK, one more time.
…How about NOW????
…OK, Give it another shot.
…This time for sure.
…What other apps are you running?
…Do you have all the latest drivers?
…When was the last time you upgraded your motherboard?
…You’re not using a KVM switch or something, are you?

Promotional literature for “Napster to Go” says:

(from http://www.napster.com/ntg.html)

“Now you can fill and refill your compatible MP3 Player without paying 99¢ per track.* Get all the music you want in a whole new way…”

“…* Napster To Go works with selected players from Creative, Dell, Gateway, iriver, Samsung and others.”

Pardon my attitude, but this wording actually left me optimistic that “your MP3 player” might mean “my MP3 player,” or at least one of the three or five MP3-capable devices I own. None of them was on that list, but having so many devices, I figured among them would be one of the “others,” and it would work with Napster to Go. So I signed up.

Of course, after much experimenting I was disappointed to find that I had wasted my first couple of weeks of Napster To Go.

I toyed with the idea of pirating the music I’d downloaded from Napster, and then rationalizing the piracy by the fact that I had been paying the proper rate for making copies, I just wasn’t able to make those copies. But I’m not so much the pirate as the Fake Cowboy.

So rather than fighting the system or bypassing the system, I decided to give in to the system. I bought a Zen Micro, the second unit listed on Napster’s “featured Napster to Go-compatible players.” I figured this was a sure bet. I had everything on the requirements list. But I did notice a little “firmware updates” link next to the Zen Micro on the “featured Napster to Go-compatible players” page.

(http://www.napster.com/compatible_devices/index.html)

You have to update your firmware first, so that it will run Microsoft’s “Plays for Sure.”

So I bought my Zen, and when it arrived I went to the “firmware updates” page.

(http://us.creative.com/local/1/firmware/zenmicro/eula.asp)

Where I found the following (bold) phrases (this is cut and pasted directly from their web page, the bolds were added by me):

“Creative Zen Micro PlaysForSure with Windows Media Player 10 Update
IMPORTANT: This is a beta (unfinished) version of this update. Before installing beta firmware, you should understand that a beta release does not have the stability of released Creative firmware. You could experience problems while using it.”

Is it just me, or have I just now bought something very expensive that might not work, which uses in its marketing the phrase “Plays for Sure?”

It is to laugh.

I have heard that this is Microsoft’s issue rather than Creative’s. Maybe. Let’s deal with saving Microsoft from their eternal damnation separately, it may require some work.

So, maybe Microsoft is at fault. BUT…Here’s what I do know:

There is nothing forcing Creative to continue selling a product to me and you and our kids, based on claims that it will work with Napster, when that might not be true. I consider this akin to robbery.

If the Zen Micro firmware works with Napster, call it non-beta shipping software and remove the scary “lawyer-proofing” language from the website.

On the other hand, if the buyer “might experience problems,” that’s not a product that can be called compatible with Napster. Take that claim off of your website, Napster and Creative.

Grrrrrrrr.

Is it just ME???? My buddy Robert says that there are other hardware products that ship with beta software, and the “real” software never comes out. Whaddaya say?

Related link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1932111972/qid=1116888806/sr=8-1/r…

I’m recommending two of my very favorite books of all time:

A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster

Raph, the Creative Lead of Many a Famous Online Game looks first at Human Nature, and from that, he deduces that games are very important, and puts forward formulae for understanding games. You end up going, “Woah.”

BUT LOOK!

The Game of God: Recovering Your True Identity by Arthur B. Hancock, Kathleen J. Brugger

Hancock and Brugger start with the appealing nature of games. Working backwards from Koster, they manage to conclude the essence of Human Nature…

It’s the Same Thing, but Opposite!!!!!

AND it gets even MORE scary!!!

Are you ready???

They both use BIG fonts, and can be read in about a day…but there’s MORE!!!

Do the “search inside this book” button on both books…do you see it?

Both books have the Crappiest Drawings of Games and Humans engaged in Gaming and Other Things that You’ve Ever Seen or Ever Will See!!!!!

What’s the deal? Where were these guys when God was handing out right hands???? If you’re a genius writer, does your ability to draw well go down the toilet? Inquiring minds want to know!

Anyway, the Universe works, so says I, and games are a bloody important part of that. If you read both these books, you’ll understand why, you’ll be a great philosopher, and you’ll be able to make a pile of money off of making totally excellent games. And it will have only taken, like, two days.

But your eyes will hurt from the awful drawings.

That’s my book report. Sorry I’m late. My dog ate the good one.

Your Move.

PHOTO: El Hombre Gourdo

Kind game developer friends gave a great gift to The Fat Man at the GDC this year–this double-gourd sitar. Minutes after this happy photo was taken, George was offered what will perhaps turn out to be one of the biggest and most creatively interesting game audio gigs of his singularly big and creatively interesting career. He also wants you to know that this is how the Universe appears to work. He also want you to know that if it feels like you already knew that, it is clearly an auspicious sign.

—————

What do you see in this picture? Desire?

Is this man saying “How can I make money?” “I could be checking my e-mail.” “Do you realize how much money those bastards are making off of my hard work?” No, he is not. He is not saying anything.

Do you see Fear?

Does he appear to be thinking that his favorite Indian-American near-brother-in-law will look at this photo and condemn him, saying, “Oh, my Gods, this terrible Fat Man has his Ree where his Ga should be!! Never again shall we let him hold the Sacred Instrument of Our People!!!??” The man in the photo may appear to be thinking something like this, but in fact no, I can tell you because I was there wearing his clothes, he is not thinking much of anything.

He is just a guy who looks like a hippie, his heart full of happiness. If you had been there at the moment the photo was taken, and had offered him a nice drink, a large sum of money, or a beautiful woman’s sexual favors, he might actually have refused. Here he is in a moment of centeredness, giving his best shot at making something beautiful-sounding come out of an instrument that he seems to love and that perhaps at this point in his life he has very little idea how to play. He is playing to an audience of one guy with a camera who might or might never help his career. His heart can hold no more.

What was his goal for GDC? Each time he met somebody, he tried to make their day a little better, rather than a little worse.

What did he take home from GDC? Some damn huge, great offers from some VERY heavy players. And he was honored with a Sitar, also a gift from some of these heavy cats. And he got the reassurance, as usual, that the Greats of our industry, the people whom most of us truly want to emulate show little fear. They share an ability to cut through the bull of business, to tell things as they see ‘em, to spot real fun when it is happening, to make the time to participate in that fun. It is part of what makes them great. It is part of what makes life living. It is essential to the Gamer’s Art.

That man in the picture, aka Me, saw a lot of Fear and Desire at the GDC, as usual. Or I should say, as has been recently customary. Long ago, CGDC was the meeting place of Superheroes and Demigods, who would celebrate their powers and accomplishments together with games of poker and MULE, and confer with each other on the best attacks to use against level 7 Demons. I would like to bust one myth right now: We didn’t hang out in the CGDC bar to make connections and Big Business Deals. Oh, it happened enough all right, but that’s not why we were there in the first place. We hung out there because that was where great, creative people were happily shooting the breeze, with expressions on their faces not entirely unlike those of the man in the picture.

Gradually GDC has become more and more a place to go if you want to get into a career in your beloved pastime, presumably gaming. It has also become more and more a place to go if you have some technical savvy, or don’t, and want to become rich off the latest trend in high-tech consumerism. Recently, GDC has taken on the appearance of an event one must attend in order to “make it in the industry.”

For no real reason other than the Nature of Things, combined with the almost mythical proportions of the GDC, illusions have grown up around the event that have inflamed our tendencies to be greedy and fearful rather than comfortable. The desire is of course nothing new, but to me this year’s event appeared to have an aura of fear around it that could be cut with a level two dagger.

In the words of my British friends, “bugger all that bollocks.”

Here is a small batch of level-7 symptoms of fear-related illusions that I observed at GDC, and for You the Good Reader, I provide counterexamples or counterattacks to each symptom. Further, making certain assumptions about what will be the hot topic of the publication in which this article will appear when and if it is published, I will unify all of these counterstrikes with summaries that fall under one fashionable, current, and easy-to-remember heading: What Would Will Wright Do?

Symptom: Attention is more and more drifting towards marketing angles and technological advancements, and away from the one thing we sell-well-designed and fun games.

Counter: For those who are distracted by marketing and technology, we must remember that these things are an integral part of what our business is now, but they provide the promise of only short-term success. All technological angles will sooner or later be matched or overtaken by competitors. All marketing angles will eventually be seen as window dressing on an interactive experience.

What Would Will Do? I didn’t see any fancy cooperative marketing angles tacked onto “Spore.” And even though a massive potential exists to do so, how could any of that compare in money-making ability to the game’s incredible potential to grab the attention of the public-due entirely to its fascinating game design and innovative leverage of technology to “amplify creativity.” Damn. The money is in the FUN!

Symptom: With a few honorable and staggering exceptions, “Game Design” has become akin to “porting chess.” Although chess is a good game, we are a games business, and it does not become us to merely put out the equivalent of Simpsons Chess and Mafia Chess and Dark Chess X-Treme III. This should only make up a small proportion of the energy that we might spend in creating, developing, and distributing, say, a Charades, a couple of Backgammons, a Crazy 8’s, and a Rugby.

Counter: One need not look far to find individuals and small groups who have dedicated themselves to creating, per the analogy above, things like Hangman and Texas Hold-Em. In fact, where were the biggest crowds at GDC? See below.

What Would Will Do? Only in the most shallow sense is there anything “port-y” about Will’s projects. And did you see the line outside his talk? At some level, we are all responding to the call of the Truth of what business we are in. It does us good to remember that the public will likely respond on the whole the way other Humans (for example, GDC attendees) do to the fascinating lure of beautiful game design. Damn. The money is in the FUN!

Symptom: Under the banner of showing “responsibility to investors,” corporate policy is more risk-averse than ever. This runs counter to the notion of gaming, in which the joy of taking risks is almost always celebrated.

Counter: Looking at past successes and cloning them is a certain recipe for failure, or at best, short-term success.

What Would Will Do? Safe games peter out. Great, innovative, risk-taking games are the only ones that stand a chance of being great, long-term successes. Ironically, nothing shows this better than taking a close look at the award winners and top-sellers, especially over recent years. When will we, like Will, stop looking at the winners and trying to clone them, but rather, see that they are winners because they are made by fearless people, and instead pay homage to them, stand on their shoulders, and elevate the Art of Fun? Damn. The money is in the FUN!

In conclusion:

The only thing we in the Game business sell is fun. Every cent of the money that supports all the thousands of GDC attendees comes from the sale of fun. All fun that is related to gaming requires the presence of a good, healthy relationship to risk. Learn this about your business: What fun is a game-what good is a game if the player has no potential to lose? How can one win a game if one does not take that risk? And applying the wisdom of gaming to the corporate world: How can a corporation be responsible to its investors if it has no chance of winning the competitive game of business? And how can it win if it doesn’t play the game, and how can it play the game if it takes no risks?

Fear has no place at the GDC. It has no place in gaming. It has no place in your life. Don’t give it the free mental real-estate that it seems to be demanding. It doesn’t pay rent. Fun does. See Fig. 1.

As a last word of advice, though unasked, I would beg you to try this:

Do the thing you do, and do it earnestly and with intensity. Make music, make games, hang out with the people you like and admire, trade ideas. Celebrate the moment and intensify its crunchy goodness with your far-fetched ideas and inspired designs. Believe in yourself.

Tell the truth, and do NOT be afraid of the consequences.

The greater part of the industry is not going down the toilet. The great work is not going on exclusively in tiny little crevices here and there. Rather, it’s only in fear-filled little crevices that caution and greed give the appearance of sucking people down into their own private hell-holes. And it’s so easily avoided by looking around. The industry is by-and-large truly focused on its center, Beauty, Fun, and Game Design, (as evidenced by its fascination with Will Wright). It’s just that it’s hard for us as individuals and as a community to always remember that we are focused on these things and especially to remember that it’s a very good thing.

Have Fun.
Don’t Worry.
Be Hippie.

I believe this will result in your having all the success and happiness that your heart can hold.

Love,
The Fat Man

Are YOU talking to ME?

This prayer came to me one night in 2004, camping out with the Boy Scouts in an incredible Texas thunderstorm. I just thought really hard about what I most wanted to do with each moment of my life, thinking really carefully about each word. This is what I got:

May the Unbounded Joy
That comes from God’s Love
Flow through me
To all of Creation
Like the “Chain Lightning” attack
In Warcraft III.

(Amen)

You gonna argue with that???

Related link: http://www.uneasysilence.com/archive/2005/05/3065/

While assembling today’s news items for the O’Reilly Digital Audio site, I came across an interesting article about making free phone calls with an iPod. (Thanks to Hack a Day for the link.) Basically, you download some WAV files, make playlists in your ’pod, and then blare them into a defenseless payphone. (Some of the WAVs duplicate the confirmation tones the phone generates when a caller inserts a coin; others duplicate the sounds of the 0–9 buttons.)

The process, called phreaking, is illegal of course, but has been a classic hacker challenge for almost 50 years. In his salad days, Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak reportedly tried to call the Pope in Rome for free with a homebrew gadget.

Legal issues aside, it’s so hard to find a payphone these days that you’d probably be better off using VoIP to make your free calls. But then my eyes lit on the Olympus DS-2, the high-quality digital voice recorder I’d recently reviewed, and I got an idea.

Downloading the WAVs from the Phreaks and Geeks site, I pasted the seven tones representing a friend’s cell phone number into a new document in my audio editor. I separated the tones with blank spaces (via the Insert Silence command) that were the same length as the individual tones. Then I held the telephone receiver up to the computer speaker and hit Play.

“We’re sorry! Your call could not go through as dialed.”

Remembering a line on the original site about putting five-second gaps in the playlist, I added more space between the tones (about a quarter of a second total). It worked!

Then I held the DS-2 voice recorder up to the speaker and recorded the sequence. Holding the DS-2’s speaker up to the phone, I was able to dial successfully again. Because the DS-2 lets you name your recordings, I titled the toneburst with my friend’s number.

I later remembered that Palm Desktop software can also generate touch-tones from entries in your address book. Recording that sequence off the computer speaker into the DS-2’s mic was a lot faster than assembling the tones in the audio editor, although the Palm sequence played back more slowly.

Of course, carrying touch-tones around in a voice recorder is kinda silly if you also have a cell phone, but I often forget my phone whereas I almost always carry my voice recorder. And it’ll surely make a good party trick. Now, where did I put the Pope’s number?

What’s on your phreakin’ iPod?

I was 11 when Star Wars debuted in 1977. And 28 years later, I figured I might as well finish out the second trilogy with “Revenge of the Sith”, even if I wasn’t thrilled with the episodes I and II. So I ponied up $9 to see it at midnight, qualifying me squarely at the lower end of the “Star Wars fanatic” camp if only because I wasn’t willing to wait in line or drive more than 10 minutes to see it.

Let me say that this is easily bests “Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones.”

Some spoilers follow, so be forewarned.

This is a relatively dark movie, similar in feel to some of the earlier Batman flix with Michael Keaton. Hayden Christiansen gives a subtle and brooding, if not spectacular performance as Anakin Skywalker. Ewan McGregor is weak and effete with none of the swashbuckling charm that Harrison Ford brought to the earlier trilogy and none of the gravity that Alex Guiness brought to the older Obi Wan. Lots of good light saber fights, especially one with the creepy General Grievous (why does a robot have a cough and a hunched posture)?

Yoda is completely computer generated. I preferred the old Frank Oz puppet in the closeups. And please explain to me why he walks like an old man but can flip around like Jet Li. Well, I guess they never explained that about Mickey Rivers either (1970s Yankees reference).

Samuel L. Jackson remains farcically wooden in an attempt to appear as the Zen Mace Windu. His only good scene is when he acts more like the vengeful Shaft he should be. The movie does a surprisingly good job of interweaving the political intrigue. They also nicely handle the big question from Episode II, namely, “Am I the only one who thinks it is obvious that the Chancellor is evil?”

The biggest disappointment however was Natalie Portman as Padme. Her acting and the writing combined to remind me, every time she was on the screen, that this was a movie with actors. I wanted to remain immersed, and she broke the illusion almost as much as when the houselights accidentally came on between reels.

There is very little humor in this film, save for some R2D2 droid antics. I really would not recommend it for anyone under 13, or perhaps even 15. There is some disturbing stuff, including lots of amputations and, yes, killing children (although not shown in a graphic manner).

There really is surprisingly little back story filled in (beyond what you could predict yourself), save for perhaps how the Emperor’s face got so pale and craggy. Ian McDiarmid, BTW, is excellent as Supreme Chancellor Palpatine. My skin crawled almost every time he was on screen. He should be nominated for best supporting actor as surely as Ian McKellan deserved an Oscar for playing Gandalf in LOTR.

Jimmy Smits is pathetic, especially when he says “My wife and I were talking about adopting a girl.” Okay, let me get this straight. We’re talking about saving the future of the galaxy by protecting one of the infants that can someday lead the rebels to victory, and Jimmy Smits’ motivation is “my wife and I were talking about adopting”!!!!!? The Terminator movies do a far superior job of portraying what it would be like to preserve the future leader of a rebel insurrection.

The movie does a good job or portraying Anakin’s emotional and physical transformation into Darth Vader, but I’d quibble with the cinematography when “the helmet goes on.” They shot the helmet being inserted from the side and then show Darth Vader sitting up. It just looked campy and Frankenstein-monster-like rather than dramatic. Easily the biggest missed opportunity of the film (although bolting on the face of the mask separately was a nice touch). Thankfully, the real climax comes earlier, so it was an interesting choice not to make that scene the climax of the entire trilogy.

Anyway, a good film, perhaps the best of the six considering the expectations it has to meet, but not a great film. Certain to bring in at least $500 million at the US box office if not top “Titanic”. If you’re reading this review, you’ll see it regardless of what I say. I don’t know if I will bother seeing it twice, but probably not. I’d give it 8 out of 10 stars. Overall, the LOTR and Terminator trilogies are much better (the latter being severely underated).

What is your favorite and least favorite episode? Will there be an episode VII?

Related link: http://ka-map.maptools.org/

Amidst raving about Google maps capabilities, an new open source project pops up that does many of the same things.

ka-Map, released by DM Solutions, handles many of the same web mapping challenges that Google has handled so well. The project is being opened up for open source participation, improvements and testing. It looks very promising and powerful, with a ton of great data loaded behind and powered by the open source MapServer.

Here is a quote from the main project page:

ka-Map currently has a number of interesting features. It sports the usual array of user interface elements such as:

Related link: http://www.costik.com/weblog/2005_03_01_blogchive.html#111069190589189590

Ever notice how many words that were once nouns are now verbs?

It started with “Party.” “I went to a party” turned into “I partied.”

Same with many other words:

“Lunch”
“Network”
“Blog”
“Slashdot”

I call the process of turning a noun into a verb “verbing.” Let it be known that I was the person who first verbed “verb.”

I got both blogged and slashdotted this week.

I stumbled across a snippet of Greg Costikyan’s talk from the 2005 GDC and I couldn’t believe how in sync this guy was with what I was writing in my song “Viva La Resolution.” Check out his talk, it’s good.

Costikyan’s GDC rant

I told Greg last week that I liked this article (to which I am sending y’all). I sent him to my blog of Viva La Resolution

My Blog about Viva La Resolution

He said he liked my song, and he blogged it on his blog. Costikyan’s Blog
so now we’re Blog Buddies, our fates are intertwined, and bla bla bla, which was fine with me.

But then a guy named “Zonk” Slashdotted Greg’s blogging of my blogging of my song. I know you guys will giggle, but I didn’t know what “slashdotting” was. I just got a fairly excited call from my wonderful friend Mark at Xbox saying, essentially “There’s this thing called The Slashdot Syndrome. You can expect to see an increase in hits.” Actually, my friend Bridgit had already emailed me about the Slashdot article, and had even sent me a link to a person who would have been willing to help me try to avoid any bandwidth overload problems. But by the time I read her messages, it was too late, and email communication from my servers was useless.

Tyson, my tech guy, got a call from us in the middle of the night. “What’s wrong?” asked his girlfriend as Tyson put his keys in his pocket and jogged towards the door.

“Fat Man got Slashdotted,” came the grim reply.

My servers broke because that’s what happens when you get slashdotted. You get a million hits, and your hub’s plug falls out of its socket and Roadrunner experiences a power outage in your area, which all did happen.

It’s kind of too bad because very few people who responded to the article on Slashdot ever actually heard the song about which the article was written. Some very kind folks, including Zonk and Greg Costikyan and one Mitch Zamara, helped me set up a mirror site to handle the traffic, but by then it was kind of late in the game and most folks had drawn their conclusions and judged my song and my story by the one-paragraph description that had actually made it to Slashdot.

To show my genuine grattitude and my humorously exaggerated annoyance with the way things turned out, I am going to salute Zonk by executing an Evil Plan…with your help.

I’m going to blog Zonk’s slashdotting of the blog of the blog of the song that fat wrote, because, well, I AM A GAMER!!! AND THAT IS WHAT GAMERS DO!!!!!!

Click on this link.

The Article on Slashdot that Crashed my Computer

Let’s see if we can shut down Slashdot by “O’Reillying” them!

Much Love,
FAT

Send me so many comments that you “your name here” the O’Reilly site!!

I sold some stuff on eBay for the first time. When I received the bill, I signed up for it to be paid automatically via my PayPal account. Life’s great, eh?

Not so fast. A month later, eBay hits me with late fees and puts my eBay account on hold. Turns out, they didn’t debit PayPal automatically as I’d asked them to. Instead, I was supposed to divine that auto-pay works only for invoices received after auto-pay is set up.

You might say that is predictable. In fact, that is how my bank works. When I sign up for e-bills or auto-pay, my bank warns that it might not kick in right away and that I should pay manually for the next billing cycle.

So here is my defense:

eBay and PayPal are part of the same company. Someone should be able to figure this out.

Not convinced? Fine, either was I. So when I first signed up for auto-pay, I asked eBay customer service when my account would be debited. They said it would happen in 5 or 10 days. They mentioned nothing about it *not* happening in the first billing cycle. Obviously, I was asking about that because people who had been using the service for more than a month wouldn’t be asking the question!

Still not convinced? Fine, you’re a skeptic. So am I. So when I didn’t notice a debit (shortly before the payment was due–30 days after the invoice was sent), I again contacted customer support at eBay. Should I pay manually, I asked? No, they said, that would just result in a double payment and confuse everyone.

Okay, so I’m a lunatic raging against the machine, right? No, nothing of the sort. I calmly contacted customer service, asked them to remove the late fee and reinstate my account. Everyone makes mistakes, and they were entitled to a second chance.

Instead, they gave me the runaround through 10 emails, refusing to credit (drum roll please….) 8 cents! They insisted that because I wouldn’t accept blame for their systems’ limitations that I somehow did not understand them. The coup de grace (sp?) was their customer service rep (ironically named “Grace”) chastising me to make sure I wouldn’t let this happen again in the future.

So to summarize, eBay customer service sucks even worse than their software.

Can anyone recommend a better auction site with a liquid market in BrixWear T-shirts?

Give me your eBay horror stories.

Related link: http://www.xmlbelux.be/events/index.html

May is quite eventful for me.

At the beginning of the month, I released another VST virtual synthesizer as shareware.
>CS-80R implements the architecture Yamaha used in the 70s, notably in the CS-80 (as used by Garth Hudson). I am pretty happy with it. Early user response was pretty good, and I updated with some extra features (rewritten ring modulator, extra “blat” and pitch-dependent “blip”, not to get technical.)

I used it to make a couple of remixes for Nick Carr’s Non-Zero records. I am working on a review of Adobe Audition which the OReilly Digital Media site may pick up. I like Audition, but it has taken months of use to figure out how to make the dynamics processor not crappy: Audition’s meters are too high compared to analog tape, so you have to keep levels down by about 6 to 24 db to get the processor to work well. Nice to be actually playing again!

Much of the month has been spent adding custom menus to a military Adobe FrameMaker application: SGML of course. And also supervising our new releases. Making ISO Greek4 work with non-Unicode applications makes me love Unicode more.

Some nice guys from one of the largest companies came over and we may do something with
Schematron: spent a little time organizing systems tests at a lab later this month. We need to have transaction rate tests for Schematron for validating messages. At the other end of the spectrum, we had a request for validating 52 Gig documents (yes, Gig, and they do one each day): this would be job for Schematron with STX (streaming transformations for XML) as its query language binding.

Today my company
Topologi released new versions of all its utilities and some new products: about ten new distros. The low-end product line is starting to look pretty solid now. We are saving the big gun, our collaborative schema authoring and documentation tool, for Amsterdam.

Next week I am on a working holiday in Belgium.
While in Belgium I’ll be backpacking in Brugge, and hopefully having a totally non-electronic birthday.
My present to myself is the wonderful CD “The Ultimate Staple Singers” which has material from all their career: I would have preferred more “Great Day” period tracks, but it includes “You gonna make me cry” and “I wish I had answered” so I have no complaints.<smiley>

In Louvain in Belgium
I am giving two day-long
>seminars in Belgium, sponsored by Paul Hermanns and the kind people at BeLux XML users group:
one on “Expressing Business and Publishing Rules in Schematron” and one “XML Quality Assurance”. Probably we will offer the same courses back in Australia.

Then to Amsterdam for a week. There is an ISO meeting at the start of the week, probably talking about schema pipelines which I am not passionate about. The Schematron draft has about three months to go now before it is due to become an ISO standard, but that requires no particular effort from anyone (except for Ken Holman and Martin Bryan who have the administrative burden) so I need to stop being lazy and finally get my ISO Schematron implementation out: it has been sitting on the shelf. It compatible with the current framework implementation.

I’ll be giving a paper at XML 2005 on our TreeWorld browser and trying to flog some products. I believe I am chairing the session that Murata Makoto san has a paper: he really is an admirable champion for awareness of Japanese activity.

Over a blood test (I always get the wonderful
>butterfly needle) to see whether I was infected with something horrible by a madman last month (apparantly not, thank God), my sweet doctor recommended an Indonesian restaurant in Amsterdam, Kantjil & de Tigre: not pricy and excellent food. Sounds great. I am having a lot of Indonesian recently: so far from Western ideals of tenderness; fat Rick says he always find Rendang made by Malaysians richer and more addictive than Rendang made by Indonesians, wonderful enough as that is…thin Rick says “No don’t dwell on it!”. Anyway, everyone concerned about potential HIV infection should
know about href="http://www.aids.org/factSheets/156-Treatment-After-Exposure-to-HIV-PEP.html">PEP.
I was horrified to discover that Americans pay over US$600 for drugs that cost patients US$40 here in Australia. Making prevention too expensive for poor people is a puzzling way to stop an epidemic. Insane or evil, actually.

Then back home at the beginning of June. If you are interested in any of the seminars or the paper, or just want to chat to me about anything, please come to one of the events or collar me over coffee or beer (or waffles and herring?)

Related link: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/webmapping/index.html

Are you a web developer, data analyst or some other geek who wants to jump on the “location” bandwagon? Here are some of the “geospatial” basics you need to know. Want to learn more? My new book, Web Mapping Illustrated, will get you up to speed in no time.

What is geospatial anyway?
Geospatial data refers to information about the geographic location of an entity. This often involves the use of a geographic coordinate, like a latitude or longitude value. Spatial data is another commonly used term, as are: geographic data, geographic information system (GIS) data, map data, location data, coordinate data and spatial geometry data.

Applications using geospatial data perform a variety of functions. Map production is the most easily understood function of geospatial applications. Mapping programs take geospatial data and render it in a form that is viewable, usually on a computer screen or printed page. Applications can present static maps (a simple image) or dynamic maps that are customised by the person viewing the map through a desktop program or a web page.

Many people mistakenly assume that geospatial applications just produce maps, but geospatial data analysis is another primary function of geospatial applications. Some typical types of analysis include computing:

Related link: http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2005/05/digital_rights.php

I’ve started blogging at siliconvalleywatcher.com specifically on the subject of digital video. This link goes to an excerpt from my book on digital rights management for internet video. It’s written in the form of a movie script and is an extremely entertaining read.

Related link: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/05/03/Replacing-WSDL

I received a good amount of feedback, some off-line, on a thread I started on the
>XML-DEV mail list
incompatible use of XML Schemas
which carried through on a thread called
Schema Compatability.

The executive summary:
many tools that use XML Schemas for purposes other
than validation only implement subsets, by necessity or
design; which means that
schemas are not always portable.
This has a major impact on deployment:
am I over-reacting to think this completely
stuffs up the presupposition of Web Services,
which is that all the data provider is responsible for
is publishing their
data, schema and protocol;
the recipient will be able use that information with
different vendor’s applications.
In other words, when the Information Architect of
an organization says “We shall use web services and
schemas” does he or she also say “But don’t
use any but the most conservative subset of
features, otherwise everyone will have to use the
same vendor’s tools“? Which is clearly a problem
because it means that the current state of the art
is not that, within an organization, suppliers of
data can do so without regard to the applications that
the receivers are using.

The W3C people on to this issue too: they
obviously need to get it addressed not only to
prevent Web Services from flopping but also
so that the XQuery hypists are not left floundering
on an non-interoperable substrate. No-one enjoys
floundering on a substrate, believe me.
Henry Thompson wrote in to publicize the
>W3C Workshop on XML Schema 1.0 User
Experiences which seems a really practical
thing to get used to.
Unfortunately, from some of the private email
it seems that people are very loath to say the
Emperor has no clothes, some for fear of looking
an idiot if they are wrong, some because the
clearly Emperor has some clothes,
and at least in one case because the incompatability
is in their employer’s product that they obviously
cannot write bad things about in public.

I expect the Irish RIG profiles will include
good advice on this issue.
The kinds of advice I would expect are that for
maximum compatibility with applications:

• Avoid dynamic typing (i.e. the xsi:type
  attribute and substitution groups
• Avoid wildcards
• Avoid element recursion
• And the perennial classic:
  double-check your schema using some
  other tools, in particular to detect
  ambiguous content models.

Other posts mentioned what I suspect were merely
features that an application did not use: that an
application does not understand ID uniqueness is
probably harmless at this level. If it does not
understand and barfs if presented with a document
with a schema with ID uniqueness constraints, that
is the non-interoperable behaviour.

One of the most interesting responses,
on profiles and conformance, came from
>Gregor.

So what is a poor Information Architect to do,
when they want schemas to promote not prevent
interoperability?
The first thing is to be quite militant, and to
demand of vendors that their implementations
allow the XML Schema non-core abstractions:
type substitution, abstract types, recursion,
mixed content, wildcards,
type derivation, redefinition, and so on.
And to check with multiple tools that all
important corporate schemas are
conforming, non-ambiguous schemas.
If a vendor’s tools do not support these,
either make the feature an organization-wide
deprecated feature, or demand your money back from
the vendor for flogging a non-conforming product.

Let me back-pedal a little.
It is not impossible that there are XML Schemas
features that are impossible for a given application to
use. For example, what is an application that generates
database table definitions do when a schema has wildcards?
But place to solve this is at the application, not
the schema: the application should have a switch
“ignore non-required wildcards” or whatever, so that
it will not barf uneccessarily.

Related link: http://www.xtech-conference.org/2005/friday.asp

I suspect that we haven’t seen anything yet, as far as XML’s mid-term impact on software design.

You remember Sun’s early slogan “XML gives Java something to do”? Well XML gave Unicode something to do, XML is giving web services something to do, but ultimately XML gives URIs something to do.
My prophecy is that XML’s big impact on APIs
will be the movement of web-based (and possibly RESTful) technologies inside the computer and inside the application.
There are two good examples of this I know of, and I am interested in knowing more. Both have been used successfully in real applications.

The one is HP’s
>NetKernel which is a kind of Linux where, instead of UNIX pipes or streams being the dataflow mechanism, they provide XML-based pipelines. This provides a simple API into which modules can be plugged which range from graphics to web services. The central part is that everything in (this part of) the operating system is accessible by URL, and that XML is the prime method of data exchange.

The other one is closer to home: my company
Topologi’s
Universal Wire architecture, as used in most of our products for the last 3 years.
I will be talking about the details of it, in relation
to the TreeWorld browser at
>XTech 2005 in Amsterdam on Friday 27th May, morning
in a paper
Organic Extensibility as a Browser Design approach, as implemented in the TreeWorld browser for ad hoc XML.
(Otherwise known as “OEAABDAAIITTWBFAHX”,
and also probably what Bill Gates says when thinks about Google.)
The talk is part of the
>Browser Technology stream.

In Universal Wire, the desktop application program (and thin client, and web service interface) is organized like a miniature World-Wide-Web. Every GUI control triggers a URL, which gets sent through a switchboard and routed to the appropriate service. The service may be local, it may be on the web, it may be sent too a peer (Topologi uses JXTA, but Rendezvous or pretty well any peer system could be used.)

It has long been reasonable to assume that over the passage of time, every piece of data in an operating system will be addressable by URL, navigatable-to as one or more trees by XPath, and retrievable in XML. Universal and uniform addressability, traversability and retrievability have the kind of practical, retrofittable elegance that makes life easier for developers and users.

What I don’t think has been clear is that the computations of computers, in particular the API,
also benefit from the URL/XPath/XML treatment.
I don’t know what to call this architecture:
XML Inside?, MiniWeb?, hypotext?, PAX (Paths, Addressing, XML).

I doubt very much
that the Java crowd or MicroSoft will want to ditch
their 90’s generation Object APIs (Java and CLR respectively) in favour of something like Universal Wire.
But certainly it seems the kind of thing that can usefully be tacked on in key areas: the separation of controllers from actions in GUIs for example as in TreeWorld, or to base the OS on a web-server design as in NetKernel.

Any other examples of URI/XPath/XML or similar?

In 2002 the New York Times quoted David Bowie as saying that music would soon become like running water. As if to underscore that idea, NYTimes.com will still charge you $2.95 to read the article, but it’s easy to find elsewhere online for free.

I thought about the flow and malleability of digital music this week as I manipulated a song in ways that are downright astonishing when you stop to think about them.

Related link: http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000904551

Linkin Park wants out of its contract with Warner Music group, saying they have no confidence in WMG’s IPO plans and may distribute their music via the Internet instead. Full Billboard story here.

WMG was bought last year by a group led by Edgar Bronfman of Seagrams, in his re-entry into the music business after selling Universal to Vivendi in 2000. Bronfman and the other new WMG owners plan an IPO that will reap them hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time, they are cutting staff and other expenses at the struggling label.

Linkin Park’s management claim only $7 million of the $750 million IPO proceeds will go to operations, and none to WMG artists. WMG says the LP managers’ numbers are wrong, and charges that the threat of bolting is just a hardball tactic as part of Linkin Park’s current contract renegotiation.

Thanks to Boing Boing, where I found the announcement.

Here’s something I made up to explain to my kids about Heaven and Hell. It applies extremely well to computer technology:

“If only” is Hell; “Oh well” is Heaven.

Or is it? You decide…

INVESTOR ALERT: With the proliferation of the Internet, access to information appears to be decreasing in value. We recommend that our clients consider reinvesting their funds into quirky habits, interesting tastes, cowboy hats, green shoes, and other stuff like that, because The Fat Man says it would be smart for some reason.

Aww, dang, now I have to back that up somehow. Oh, well. Here goes…;

We can certainly say that, for anybody with access to the Web, all that information still has value, but access to information is no longer the thing we crave. Increasingly, the more scarce and therefore more valuable thing is information sorting.

This is by no means an abstract idea; we see it illustrated every day.

Look at the daily hell we call e-mail: We hate Spam. Who are the butt-heads that create this stuff? Are they the lowest of the low or what? Sorting through the Swamp of Spam eats up our bandwidth, and we wish somebody would find all the Spam and pull it out of our in baskets for us. We’d pay money for that. We do pay money for that. In fact, we occasionally catch ourselves wishing we could pay somebody to read our e-mail for us. We appreciate when people use those up-arrows appropriately in their e-mails. We can’t bear it when somebody copies us on a message that has no relevance to our most pressing issues, even if there is interesting information in that e-mail. Many of us don’t even read the joke messages that come from our friends any more–unless we notice in the header that the message comes from somebody whose taste in jokes we trust to the ends of the earth.

A pile of junk mail crowds our snail mail boxes, and we leaf through it all looking for important documents, messages from people we know and like, or a catalog from our favorite store–one we can trust to carry things that are to our taste. We didn’t intend to let all of those magazines pile up on the coffee table, but we haven’t had time to sort through them yet.

Many of us have a media backlog–a long list of movies that we’ve taped or that have been recommended by acquaintances or DVD’s loaned to us by relatives. We have CD’s of our friends’ bands. We have closets of VHS tapes that we may never watch. My friend Graeme Devine liked so many TV shows, he decided to let his VCR watch the shows for him. He just tapes a show, and then erases the tape. If we watch a movie out of a sense of obligation, we might have an awful experience, or we might be pleasantly surprised–either way, we usually (and rightly) expect the worst. BUT if our favorite film critic or our best buddy–somebody whose taste we trust–has recommended it, we watch with anticipation of a really good experience, and we are often rewarded for that.

Do you see the magnificently Human element that promises deliverance from each of these Modern Hells? Follow the trail of clues and help Fatty find the Secret Word.

–Access to information: Every[digital]body’s got it. They are swamped with it. If you don’t believe me, just try downloading the Web in a single lifetime.

–Information sorting: We crave it. We’ll pay for it. But we often don’t know where to get it. A lot of the systems we try turn out to be disappointing. Some of us end up wondering what the criteria are that are common to a good information sorting system.

–The common criterion of Information Sorting: Trust. If Gene and Roger like it, I’ll watch it. If it’s on O’Reilly, it’s interesting to me. If it’s Versace, Tommy will wear it.

–How do I know if I trust something? It comes from a source that is trustworthy.

–How does the Human Trustworthiness Radar (HTW) detect that something can be trusted? It looks for patterns in the signals sent out by the source. It looks for patterns in the source’s Behavior. It parses any quirks in it’s Personality. It analyzes…

Character.

You said the secret word!!!

Dude, if I may call you that, Dear Reader, you know in your heart that this is true. You GLOW when somebody you trust in a certain field or a certain way lays a bit of info on you that might help you decide where to go for your next book, movie, website, operating system or any other dose of digits. You are delighted even if, no, especially if, the recommendation is something you wouldn’t have checked out otherwise, like the Scoobie Doo movie. They’re giving you a great gift, it makes your life better. And that trust, therefore that gift, is only possible because of that person’s [or that company’s or that website’s] character.

Of course, a guidepost to one person can be a warning sign to another. If somebody you consider a jerk had recommended the Scooby Doo movie, you would have moved it to an even danker place in your mental dungeon of movies not to see. But again, it was the person’s character that tipped you off as to how to evaluate their input.

If Jack Nicholson or Sean Connery gets under your skin to where you can be happy watching them pick their noses, you’ll go to any movie they’re in. If you dig Woody Allen, same. If you hate him, you’ll run screaming at a glimpse of his name in the credits. Penny Arcade web comics? Love ‘em all, even the ones I haven’t seen. Games by Blizzard or Ensemble? That’s for me, maybe not you. If you think Einstein is the coolest guy ever to walk the Earth, are you going to spend your Web-browsing time losing yourself at the MIT “Fans of Feinman” website when you could be at the “Einstein Rockz” forum? Sonic Foundry: I partied with the founder, and he was a good guy, he really cared about his work, and he almost got a tattoo of my Fat Seal on his arm. I knew his company made good stuff and would continue to do so even after he passed the reigns to the next guy. And even though I’ve been disappointed a couple of times now, I’ll still buy any audio editing software made by Sonic Foundry.

WHY?

Because each of these sources provides us with ways to make our information sorting choices. Each one exhibits the most valuable commodity of the information age– personality; behaviors by which I can identify them as “my kind of company,” “my kind of director,” “my kind of guy,” to the point where I have a feeling regarding what it is about them that I trust. Then, I use that to guide me in my Digital Media consumption decisions.

AND what happens, Dear Dude, when we put the green shoe on the other foot? If we ourselves decide to let our character show, to move a little bit away from hiding the flaws and quirks in our personalities, to try to be, within reason, a little more honest, and make it plain how we feel about the things that really matter to us?

Well, today I’m thinking that, to the extent that we do these things, we make ourselves available to our friends, to people we meet, to the entire world via the Web and e-mail, as personalities. And to that same extent it becomes possible for us to, consciously or not, in business or in personal life, provide the most valuable service that there is: information sorting. When we hold this power, we can use it to make money, or we can use it to help the World, if that’s where we’re at.

And that, Dear Friends, is where the Metal hits the Meat.

One more illustration to drive the point home: in recent months I have heard more than one reporter friend of mine (nobody on O’Reilly!) say, essentially, “I’d like to say what I mean in the articles I write, Fat Man, but if I did it would be shooting my career in the foot. So I just toe the line and say what I need to say to keep the sponsors happy.” Yeeesh.

My response?

“As a writer, how does it make you feel to know that I, your Fat Friend whom you respect, can never trust anything you write? To know that nobody can trust anything you write? Are you OK with that?”

And friends, I can only speculate based on my own experience, but when you start letting it all hang out just a little more, I think you’re going to find that the shot in the green-shod foot becomes a shot in the arm. You might find that you are suddenly surrounded by the kind of people who you’ve always wanted to know, the kind who respect the same things you do. You might find that you’re not just delivered from Information Hell, but you’ve found your way to a nice little Heaven.

When you let your interesting tastes show and put on the cowboy hat, you may find that you have become just a little more like your heroes, your Jack Nicholsons, your Einsteins and your Don Quixotes. And just a little less like the butt-heads who write Spam.

In my previous blog entry I said that you don’t have to mess with the Mail.app preferences for IMAP support to work properly.

Turns out this is not really the case. If you’re on an IMAP server you need to go to Preferences -> Accounts -> Advanced and put “INBOX” (without the quotes) in the “IMAP Path Prefix” field.

The difference in behavior between 10.3 Mail.app and 10.4 is that in 10.3, your IMAP folders would not show up at all. In 10.4 they show up as subfolders of Inbox, and everything appears to work.

My clue that something was not right happened when I was typing a long message and Mail.app tried to save a copy in the Drafts folder and failed. Changing the IMAP Path Prefix put all of my folder