Never mind the big hole in it.

Dilbert author Scott Adams has an interesting blog entry, about his Donut Theory of the Universe. I call it interesting, because it is a fairly good explanation of something that has piqued the curiosity of mankind for millenia.

(As an aside, it also provides ample fodder for puns: one comment goes, “Sweet theory. I think you are on a roll with this idea. Perhaps some Danish research institute could fund research into your theory. Although, I have to admit I sort of glazed over reading it.”)

Give it a read; it’s the closest I’ve ever come to understanding these things.

Time Magazine captured the essence of 2006 (and maybe 2005 and 2004 too) when they nominated You as Person of the Year. Yes, you, who contributed to a global knowledge-base that’s larger than anything the experts could ever do. You, who brought attention to shameful acts that otherwise would have remained hidden from the public eye. You, who created an operating system that has the major for-profit vendor all worried. You, who brought us Web 2.0.

Here’s to You!

Today, December 1, is World AIDS Day. While we spend a moment of silence in memory of those who succumbed, this is also a time we can do something proactively. The (RED) effort encourages consumers to buy (RED) products over competing others, and according to their manifesto, a percentage of the proceeds will be used to buy medicine for victims of AIDS. A long list of (RED) products includes manufacturers such as Apple, Motorola, American Express, Gap, and Armani, and the effort has been endorsed by Google.

My site is wearing a red ribbon today, in the form of a red band at the top of each page. May we collectively be able to make a difference.

Google just announced a new feature in Google Maps: Click to Call. When you find a business on Google Maps, you can ask to be connected directly. Google then calls you on the number you provide, and places a call to the business at the other end.

This is yet another example of seamless task migration. The user’s ultimate goal in locating a business is to get in touch with them. The most common way to do this today is to call using a phone (at least as long as Voice-over-IP is not as ubiquitous as cellphones and land-lines). Lo, Google bridged the gap. End-to-end support for a user’s tasks using multiple devices is a challenge that’s getting its due attention only recently.

Hopefully, we will soon be able to do the same with phone numbers all over the Web. Imagine a button on my website that says, “click to call me”. Or, a button on my photo albums page that says, “view as a slideshow on the living room TV”. Or being able to press a button on your car radio to “read more about the currently-advertised product once I’m back home”.

Users who bought music from Microsoft’s MSN Music Store (no one I know, but still) will not be able to play it on the newly-announced Zune portable player. (Oh, did I mention Zune is made by Microsoft too?)

Let’s see how many different classes of people they’ve alienated this time:

1. There are the users who bought players from their hardware partners. If they want to “upgrade” to a Zune, they’ll have to re-buy their music.
2. Their hardware partners, because this is going to affect their sales, no doubt.
3. Their music suppliers, because they’re discontinuing the MSN Store.
4. And this is in addition to all of us Mac OS X and Linux users for whom Microsoft doesn’t even have a media player (not that we care, but still.)

From playsforsure.com:

Look for the PlaysForSure logo if you’re shopping for a music or video device and you want to make sure the digital music and video you purchase will play back on it every time.

Heh. I’d just buy an iPod, then.

And the irony to top it all is that this initiative was called ‘Plays for Sure’. Yeah, right.

Yeah, right. And kids do.

When one says, “guns don’t kill people”, it’s worth examining whether the same killing would have taken place in the absense of a gun. In gang wars, the answer would be yes, of course. But in many of the recent killings by school children, or — the horror — toddlers, it’s hard to argue that the answer could even remotely be ‘yes’.

Today’s killing of a 5-year old girl by her 3-year old brother might never have happened if the gun used for the killing were not available to the brother. Morgan King was even younger than Kayla Rolland at the time of her very untimely death (Kayla was thus far the youngest victim of firearm-related deaths.)

With elections around the corner, and everyone debating apparently more important issues, I hope you aren’t forgotten, Morgan.

R.I.P.

In the tradition of writing gadgets for Google Desktop and other Google properties, here’s one more from me: the Google Calendar Widget for Mac OS X Dashboard.

Since my switch to the Mac, I’ve been missing Google Desktop and using Dashboard more and more. And a calendar’s a nice thing to keep an eye on from time to time. So, without much further ado, here’s the gadget, oops, widget!

Synergy, a mouse and keyboard sharing utility, has proven insanely useful to us users of multiple machines on a single desk. Think of it as a software KVM switch, but minus the “V” (for video.) You can arrange multiple machines side-by-side and Synergy seamlessly moves the mouse pointer and keyboard input from one machine to another at desktop boundaries. It’s a great idea and a great tool.

I use QuickSynergy on my PowerBook and Mac Mini, but later happened to look at the official GUI client on my friend’s Windows laptop. It’s not often that a user interface provokes a blog post on a Monday morning, but this was it.

Here are the screenshots:

You will notice that QuickSynergy has exactly one dialog box (with two tabs, one to use when running as a server, and another when running as a client) plus one About dialog. Synergy has a total of 9 dialog boxes (plus one About dialog.) The question, I wish, the developers had asked themselves, was whether throwing in a dialog box for every single configurable parameter was the right thing to do. It seems like the UI Designer(s) simply gave up on trying to understand the users’ needs, and instead just threw everything out to the user: “here, now there’s a dialog box for every single line in the configuration file, go figure it all out.” In my opinion, that’s the designer shirking his or her responsibility of actually designing.

I wonder how many regular users would ever want to change some of the arcane options. And if there was a savvy user that wanted to, she could just edit the config file! Even as a Computer Science Ph.D. student, I have no idea what the “Relative Mouse Moves” option means, or why I should care about it. (If you say RTFM, that’s already the sign of a bad interface.)

QuickSynergy On Mac OS X	Synergy On Windows

Notice how, in the configuration screen, QuickSynergy simply shows you one screen with four text fields on the four sides, whereas Synergy expects you to enter the positions as “Machine X is to Direction Y of Machine Z.” The first way is so much more natural, but guess why the Synergy implements the second way? Because the configuration file is written that way.

These are clearly two very different styles of GUI design (though I would strongly argue that a text field for editing a configuration file does not count as a “GUI”, it’s simply a command-line interface (CLI) inside a text field.) Quick Synergy puts the user first, and is designed to let the user work naturally with his/her mental model of a keyboard/mouse layout. Synergy starts from the configuration file and slaps on a UI on top of it. Thus, Quick Synergy comes closer to the user, while Synergy stays closer to the machine.

UI Design is not about letting users edit configuration files, it’s about letting them do what they started out to do. That a config file needs to be edited to make that happen is a side story.

Now proven scientifically. Take, for instance, sleep. Nobody ever doubted that sleep was a necessity, but now I have scientific evidence to back me up when I’m caught napping in the middle of the day. I’m sleeping to stay fit, of course! They say, and I quote:

Even two or three nights of shortened sleep can have quite significant effects, he says, disrupting the normal hormonal balance and making more likely a series of long-term consequences, including obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. [...]

For adolescents, he suggests allowing them to sleep in at weekends, but not for more than two to three hours, as that can disrupt the normal rhythms.

And I drink to increase my income, if this little bit of research is to be believed. According to the authors,

“Drinkers may be able to socialize more with clients and co-workers, giving drinkers an advantage in important relationships,” the researchers said. “Drinking may also provide individuals with opportunities to learn people, business, and social skills.”

Update:
And chocolate! How can I forget chocolate! Though I do think that the term flavonoids seems more marketing-speak than genuine scientific terminology. But I’m no expert — I’m biting into this delectable delicacies purely on medical advice.

The fourth and final thing that’s good for everyone needs no scientific evidence, really.

If you’ve recovered from that tongue-twister of a title (there I go again!), here’s the news! A high-schooler’s parent in Houston is asking the school to ban ‘Fahrenheit 451‘, Ray Bradbury’s book (and later, a movie) about the horrors of a government that burns books and controls all knowledge. The grounds for the objection are the language used in the book. C’mon, the language used by high schoolers these days is nothing compared to what’s in the book. And oh, by the way, the guy, Alton Verm, says he hasn’t even read the book about whose content he’s objecting. Someone please tell me this is the 1^st of April.

The irony (apart from the obvious irony in someone trying to ban a book about banning books) is that this happened just after Banned Books Week.

Update: A friend pointed me to a similar case where an art teacher got fired for taking her students to an art museum where a student was offended by a naked statue.

If this is reason enough to fire a 28-year-veteran school teacher, I think these easily-offended students should just spend their childhood in the confines of their home, snug in their overprotective nests with their parents. After all, there’s so much else to be offended about in this world. At least that way, the rest of them would be able to explore, appreciate, and understand life, without getting their teachers fired for doing their job.

Update 2: There seem to be far too many of these occurrences these days. A Christian parent from Georgia wants to ban the Harry Potter series from her kids’ school’s media center. The reason? “I think the anti-Christian bias — it’s just got to stop.” I kid you not.

And one element that’s common in almost all these frivolous complaints is this:

“She admitted that she has not read the book series partially because “they’re really very long and I have four kids.”

I’ll end this short post here, so you may quickly go to either have a hearty laugh, or weep quietly at the anti-intellectualism in society today.

I’ve been reading Presentation Zen lately, and various related resources. I’ll credit Stanford Law School Professor, Larry Lessig, with exposing me to “alternate” styles of presentation when he gave a talk at Google last Summer.

Some interesting quotes and links I picked up along the way, with credits.

“If someone that did not attend to [sic] my presentation can understand anything if I mail them my slides, I have made a really bad set of slides. Really bad.” — eirikso.com.

“What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” — Steve Jobs.

An excellent presentation from Seth Godin at the Gel Conference, on all things broken!

Jonathan Shewchuk’s tips for academic talks.

“Start-up a PowerPoint presentation and the average IQ of the room drops by 10 points.” – Anon

A suicide PowerPoint presentation featured on The Onion.

Yayy to Judge Anna Diggs Taylor for declaring the NSA wiretapping program illegal, and asking for an immediate halt to it. Over the last year, I have been looking not at 2006, but 1984. Big Brother has been sniffing my Internet packets, the NSA has been listening to my conversations, the Ministry of Peace Department of Defense has been waging a war (Newspeak at work!), and freedom is being taken away in the name of — well, protecting freedom. It’s good to see the Judiciary acting to protect constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms and preventing exactly what the Founding Fathers warned against.

George Orwell was surprisingly farsighted; a manufactured war against a perpetual enemy, constant surveillance over all modes of communication, and even further than Orwell imagined, this Administration has even tried to request users’ search query logs … it’s all happening. Let’s just hope the dystopian future sketched in 1984 stays fresh in the minds of the citizenry to recognize such a situation when it arises in real life.

The headline of this post isn’t newsworthy at all. And the rest of the post is probably not newsworthy to a lot of people who read this blog. But I fixed a computer.

So, to fix it, my laptop connected to my cellphone via Bluetooth, which connected to a celltower via GPRS, which sent my SSH packets over TCP/IP to another university machine inside the firewall, from which I then SSHd to the sick machine, and fixed it. The irony is that the problem was with the machine’s network interface! The latency was nothing to be proud of, but was pretty usable.

This is probably the setup with the maximum number of different devices and protocols that I’ve ever used, hence it warranted a blog post.

I clearly have too much time on my hands. Or so it would seem by looking at what I’ve been doing the last hour. I just got a new phone yesterday. And I was curious as to what it might spell. So I wrote up a script to show all the names your phone number could spell and picked a choice few for myself. I would post my most interesting findings here, but I already get way too many phone calls to post my new number on the Wild, Wild Web.

No, this isn’t a warning from Winston Churchill from the World War II times, this is when Google schedules aircraft fly-bys over the Mountain View Headquarters for Geo Developers Day. Google had invited geo-developers to get together and discuss cool things that they were doing with Google Earth & Google Maps. (Oh, BTW, check out the new Google Earth for Mac and Linux!) As part of this event, the plan was to have an aircraft take aerial photos of the campus to appear on Google Earth and Google Maps shortly.

A bunch of us interns, as well as some of the guests, joined in to get ourselves more than a pixel on the map. We all lay down on the patio in an effort to capture more “screen real estate”. The aircraft made a few zigzag scans, so I’m holding my breath to see what they captured.

Meanwhile, here’s what I captured. Much less impressive than a bird’s eye view, but interesting nevertheless.

I made a video slideshow of the photos I took at the Jardin Botanique in Montréal, Canada, during my trip in April. I’d been there to attend CHI 2006 and stayed a day longer to see the beautiful city. I managed to catch a limited-time exhibition at the Botanical Garden, titled “Les Papillons en Liberté” (Butterflies Go Free.) After the trip, my laptop was 2 gigs heavier, filled with marvellous photos of the city. I’ve been lazy enough not to have posted them to my site as yet, they’re just so beautiful, my heart hurts to crop them down to web-friendly sizes. Ditto with the video …

Because I have tremendous respect for a phone that can continue to work after all I’ve done to it.

Exhibit A: my previous cellphone in its current state is held together by its own wires, and yet is able to perform all its vital bodily functions. But I feel it’s now time to retire the old-timer and get me a new Samsung T809.

????, (“The Morning”), a popular newspaper in my native tongue, ran a piece on Google Desktop. I’m not a regular reader, but my attention was drawn to it by several friends and family, who noticed my name mentioned in it. Now, while I’m not really sure how they got the info, or even where they got it from, it seems to have originated here in California on Google’s Press Day. Well, Andy Warhol was right!

Paper Version, Scanned (closer to original format)
Electronic Version, PDF (more readable)

I received an interesting email this morning:

From: Pakko Systems <******@yahoo.com>
Subject: Help with Yahoo Calendar
Date: May 18, 2006 9:18:48 AM PDT

I see u have a Nice Yahoo Calendar CVS converter to ICAL,
but I need one from ICAL to CVS to use it on yahoo, Im not
ready to kiss the ass to Google people. 

please help me

I had to write back to him:

To: ******@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: Help with Yahoo Calendar
Date: May 18, 2006 1:55:16 PM PDT

It is unlikely that I will write one, it is
not high on my priority list right now.

P.S. I work for Google.  

A new version of Google Desktop released today. (For those who came in late, I worked on Google Desktop last year, and have been writing plugins for it for some time now.) When Google Calendar released, I wrote a plugin for it too.

Since my plugin was licensed under an open-source license, Google added features to it and included it in the official download. What’s more, I even get credited in the source code. Go, Google! — kudos to the nice people in the Desktop/Calendar teams.