Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

The pharma industry is littered with cases of drugs that showed good promise, but proved to be too dangerous when they got into human trials. Dangerous side effects will cancel development for most drugs. In some cases, such as Vioxx and Fen-Phen the dangerous effects were discovered later, and the drugs pulled from the market.

I was contacted this week by the daughter of Don Watt, a well known Canadian graphic designer responsible for the branding and logos at many large companies including Loblaws and WalMart. Watt had just died at the end of December, and she was looking for more information from me about her father's account of how he had secretly been the designer of the modern Canadian Flag. She contacted me, because in his story, my father, Charles Templeton, had been the go-between for Watt and the government leaders who picked the flag.

Everybody has an Avatar review. Indeed, Avatar is a monument of moviemaking in terms of the quality of its animation and 3-D. Its most interesting message for Hollywood may be "soon actors will no longer need to look pretty." Once the generation of human forms passes through the famous uncanny valley there will be many movies made with human characters where you never see their real faces. That means the actors can be hired based strictly on their ability to act, and their bankability, not necessarily their looks, or more to the point their age. Old actors will be able to play their young selves before too long, and be romantic leading men and women again. Fat actors will play thin, supernaturally beautiful leads.

And our images of what a good looking person looks like will get even more bizarre. We'll probably get past the age thing, with software to make old star look like young star, before we break through the rest of the uncanny valley. If old star keeps him or herself in shape, the skin, hair and shapes of things like the nose and earlobes can be fixed, perhaps even today.

But this is not what I want to speak about. What I do want to speak about involves Avatar spoilers.

Who writes a gift guide in January?

This one is not about specific gifts but rather a philosophy of gift giving. Every year at Seasons I run into the problem that decently well off adults have with gift giving. They will often ask for a list of possible gifts, not knowing what to get. And it can be hard to come up with the list because, frankly in these days of online ordering, if there's something you really want that is not that expensive an item, you would have bought it already.

I have the photo archives of a theatre company I was involved with for 12 years. It is coming upon its 50th anniversary. I have a high speed automatic scanner, so I am going to generate scans of many of the photos -- that part is not too hard. Even easier for modern groups in the digital age, where the photos are already digital and date-tagged.

I just landed on a flight from Toronto to San Francisco. If you were inside the USA you may not have heard about the various crazy rules applied to travel to the USA, or at least not experienced them. While we were away the rules changed every day, and perhaps every hour.

I've been feeling we in the secular, atheist world should still have an official event at the end of the year, since with the Christians and the Jews making merry, it's a good time to do it. We have New Year's Eve of course, but so does everybody.

This new holiday, to mark the changing of the Seasons might be called "Seasons." Of course that is in part so that all the people saying "Seasons Greetings" (without the apostrophe, oddly enough) will now be making our greeting. Another name for it could be "Holidays" but that does have religious roots.

I'm waiting for the right price point on a good >24" monitor with a narrow bezel to drop low enough that I can buy 4 or 5 of them to make a panoramic display wall without the gaps being too large.

I think URL shorteners are are a curse, but thanks to Twitter they are growing vastly in use. If you don't know, URL shorteners are sites that will generate a compact encoded URL for you to turn a very long link into a short one that's easier to cut and paste, and in particular these days, one that fits in the 140 character constraint on Twitter.

It's now becoming common to kludge a conference "backchannel" onto Twitter. I am quite ambivalent about this. I don't think Twitter works nearly as well as an internal backchannel, even though there are some very nice and fancy twitter clients to help make this look nicer.

But the real problem comes from the public/private confusion. Tweets are (generally) public, and even if tagged by a hashtag to be seen by those tracking an event, they are also seen by your regular followers. This has the following consequences, good and bad.

• Some people tweet a lot while in a conference. They use it as a backchannel. That's overwhelming to their followers who are not at the conference, and it fills up the feed.
• When multiple people do it, it's almost like a spam. I believe that conferences like using Twitter as backchannel because it causes constant mentions of their conference to be broadcast out into the world.
• While you can filter out a hashtag in many twitter clients, it's work to do so, and the general flooding of the feed is annoying to many.
• People tweeting at a conference are never sure about who they are talking to. Some tweets will clearly be aimed at fellow conference attendees. But many are just repeats of salient lines said on stage, aimed only at the outsiders.
• While you can use multiple tags and filters to divide up different concurrent sessions of a conference, this doesn't work well.
• The interface on Twitter is kludged on, and poor.
• Twitter's 140 character limit is a burden on backchannel. Backchannel comments are inherently short, and no fixed limit is needed on them. Sure, sometimes you go longer but never much longer.
• The Twitter limit forces URLs to be put into URL shorteners, which obscure where they go and are generally a bane of the world.

Dedicated backchannels are better, I think. They don't reach the outside world unless the outsiders decide to subscribe to them, but I think that's a plus. I think the right answer is a dedicated, internal-only backchannel, combined with a minimal amount of tweeting to the public (not the meeting audience) for those who want to give their followers some snippets of the conferences their friends are going to. The public tweets may not use a hashtag at all, or a different one from the "official" backchannel as they are not meant for people at the conference.

The most common dedicated backchannel tool is IRC. While IRC has its flaws, it is much better at many things than any of the web applications I have seen for backchannel. It's faster and has a wide variety of clients available to use with it. While this is rarely done, it is also possible for conferences to put an IRC server on their own LAN so the backchannel is entirely local, and even keeps working when the connection to the outside world gets congested, as is common on conference LANs. I'm not saying IRC is ideal, but until something better comes along, it works. Due to the speed, IRC backchannels tend to be much more rapid fire, with dialog, jokes, questions and answers. Some might view this as a bug, and there are arguments that slowing things down is good, but Twitter is not the way to attain that.

However, we won't stop those who like to do it via Twitter. As noted, conferences like it because it spams the tweetsphere with mentions of their event.

I would love to see an IRC Bot designed to gateway with the Twitter world. Here are some of the features it might have.

There is some controversy, including a critique from our team at the EFF of Facebook's new privacy structure, and their new default and suggested policies that push people to expose more of their profile and data to "everyone."

I understand why Facebook finds this attractive. "Everyone" means search engines like Google, and also total 3rd party apps like those that sprung up around Twitter.

You may have seen it already but it's amusing to watch this encoding of a 1958 Disney show on the highway of the future:

It's over 17 years since I first too a stab at e-Books, and while I was far too early, I must admit I had not predicted I would be that early. The market is now seeing a range of e-Ink based electronic book readers, such as the kindle, and some reasonable adoption. But I don't have one yet. But I do read e-books on my tiny phone screen. Why?

Dave Winer recently made a call for an open source twitter shell, which he suggests be perhaps done with a javascript framework to let any site act like twitter.com. Many people are interested in this sort of suggestion, because while the folks at twitter.com are generally well loved and felt to be good actors, many people fear that no publishing system that becomes important should be controlled by just one company.

For success, such a system would need to be as easy to use and set up as twitter for users, and pretty easy to set up for server operators. One thing it can't do so easily, alas, is use a simple single namespace the way twitter does. A distributed system probably has to make names be domains, like E-mail addresses. That almost surely means something longer than twitter names and no use of the @name syntax popular in Twitter to refer to users. On the other hand almost everybody already has a domain based ID, ie. their E-mail address. On the other hand most people are afraid to use this ID in public where it might get spam. It's a shame, but many might well prefer to get a different ID from their E-mail, or of course to use one at twitter, which would now look like user@twitter.com to the outside world instead of @user within twitter.

Naming problems aside, the denizens of the internet are certainly up to building a publish/subscribe based short message multicasting service, which is what twitter is using terms much older than the company. I might propose the name MSM for the techology (Multicast Short Message)

It was over 5 years ago that I blogged about a robot that would travel in front of a train to spot cars stuck on the tracks in time to stop.

I recently read a local story about an RV that was demolished while stuck on the tracks here. The couple had time to talk to 911, who told them to get out, and it's not clear from the story but it seems like a moderate amount of time may have passed (a couple of minutes) before their RV was smashed.

There are a variety of tools that offer encrypted filesystems for the various OSs. None of them are as easy to use as we would like, and none have reached the goal of "Zero User Interface" (ZUI) that is the only thing which causes successful deployment of encryption (ie. Skype, SSH and SSL.)

Many of these tools have a risk of failure if you don't also encrypt your swap/paging space, because your swap file will contain fragments of memory, including encrypted files and even in some cases decryption keys. There is a lot of other confidential data which can end up in swap -- web banking passwords and just about anything else.

It's not too hard to encrypt your swap on linux, and the ecryptfs tools package includes a tool to set up encrypted swap (which is not done with ecryptfs, but rather with dm-crypt, the block-device encryptor, but it sets it up for you.)

However, I would propose that swap be encrypted by default, even if the user does nothing. When you boot, the system would generate a random key for that session, and use it to encrypt all writes and reads to the swap space. That key of course would never be swapped out, and furthermore, the kernel could even try to move it around in memory to avoid the attacks the EFF recently demonstrated where the RAM of a computer that's been turned off for a short time is still frequently readable. (In the future, computers will probably come with special small blocks of RAM in which to store keys which are guaranteed -- as much as that's possible -- to be wiped in a power failure, and also hard to access.)

The automatic encryption of swap does bring up a couple of issues. First of all, it's not secure with hibernation, where your computer is suspended to disk. Indeed, to make hibernation work, you would have to save the key at the start of the hibernation file. Hibernation would thus eliminate all security on the data -- but this is no worse than the situation today, where all swap is insecure. And many people never hibernate.

Some recent searches have revealed unusual activity on twitter, and I wonder where it's going. Narcissus searches on twitter reveal a variety of accounts tweeting links into my blog and sites, for reasons not clearly apparent.

As digital cameras have developed enough resolution to work as scanners, such as in the scanning table proposal I wrote about earlier, some people are also using them to digitize slides. You can purchase what is called a "slide copier" which is just a simple lens and holder which goes in front of the camera to take pictures of slides. These have existed for a long time as they were used to duplicate slides in film days.

Long ago I described how I want my cell phone to let me command it to play a recording to a caller noting that I have answered but need some time before I can talk, and also how I want the phone to stop ringing once I start fumbling for it. I learned that a few phones do have the former feature in a simple form, and it is something that is within the range of an app in some OSs but not others.

I struck a nerve several years ago when I blogged about the horrible beep-beep noise made by heavy equipment when it backs up. Eventually a British company came up with a solution: a pulsed burst of white noise which is very evident when you are near the backing up vehicle but which disperses quickly so it doesn't travel and annoy people a mile away as the beeps do.