Lee’s blog

The Q of S

nobody@vox.com(Lee) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 02:10:35 +0000

"What did you think?"

"Weirdly, Quantum of Solace is probably the first movie where I've finished the videogame adaptation before seeing the movie. I got this weird sense of spacial familiarity - as if it was set locally, or somewhere I'd visited. Somewhere less liberally sprinkled with armed henchmen."

"Does it pass muster? The game, I mean."

"Well it's probably the best Wii Zapper game I've played so far. I probably wouldn't have bought it is I hadn't ended up playing big-screen GoldenEye at the V&A on friday night. And yes, it's probably the most GoldenEyeish game ever made. And while that's not a bad thing, it would have been a much better thing 10 years ago. And it's a reasonable approximation of the recent movies, but then they have fewer instances of Bond throwing himself off buildings due to the stupid dual-function jump button."

"Does it open with a chase between two, presumably paid, product-placement, cars. Which was the evil car - the Alfa Romeo or the Aston Martin?"

"No driving levels for once. Maybe in the movie it's like that tech-physiognomy from the first season of 24 where people's brand choices flagged their traitorous intentions. It's weird, for all the luxury brands on display the only thing I covet is one of those little Q badges."

"It's a classy conspiracy that issues its own lapel pin. It's a shame that was the only Q in the movie."

"Oh, I think the Quatermaster's days are over. This is Bourne-era now, our tech isn't invisicar stupafantastical. It's now subject to the increasingly short gap between new/hotness and old/busted. We probably don't need grandad explaining a gadget that'll seem obsolete by the time the blu-ray is released."

"Pay attention double-oh-seven - this is what we're calling a cellular telephone."

"They just put it out there and trust the audience gets it: you've either watched those TED videos or this is the first table-surface computer you've seen, but you still get it. This Sony cybershot phone-cam works differently - fine. This headpiece comms channel is probably encrypted, no need to make a point of saying it. They don't even go out of their way to explain the combustability of those hydrogen fuel-cells at the end of the movie, they just casually point them out and minutes later... boom."

"Hydrogen fuel-cells?"

"Yeah, what did you think was causing those explosions?"

"I just assumed it was product placement for Sony's laptop batteries."

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A question of definition

nobody@vox.com(Lee) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:27:53 +0100

"This is arguably the first presidential election of the HDTV age. So is it more important a candidate looks good on high-def... or on YouTube?"

That's the question I asked author Neal Stephenson at a Q and A in London last night. I couldn't ask about his new novel - I bought it on day one, but it's big and intimidating and haven't had courage to crack open the cover yet. But my inner-fanboy desire to make an obscure allusion to his work could not be stifled.

Plus, I'd been rewatching that "Zero?" McCain moment that Danny had linked to earlier in the day.

I don't have a copy to hand, and haven't read it for 14 years, but I remember that in Interface - the political techno-thriller Stephenson co-wrote - one character claims that after HDTV is introduced into American homes only movie stars will be electable. (The higher resolution making regular people, politicians included, appear hideous.)

Years ago, if Americans got to see a presidential candidate giving a speech, it was at a distance. Across a town hall. At a state fair or some-such. This distance favoured candidates who were emotionally "hot". Television would later give the appearance of something more intimate.

For the benefit of the audience Stephenson brought up the canonical example of the 1960 Kennedy/Nixon televised debates. Television didn't do Nixon any favours, his physical reaction to the studio lights appeared to make him less trustworthy. Radio listeners gave the debate to Nixon, but more people had seen it on TV where the advantage was with the visually cooler Kennedy.

That's the problem, Stephenson said, writers have with projecting technological advances - even into the near future. It always seems far simpler when they're the ones deciding what the implications are going to be.

TV may be high-def, but how many people in 2008 had their main exposure via the comparatively crappy resolution of online video?

"It needs to be both" he eventually offered, but more as question than an answer. If you can't see them sweat on YouTube, have we switched back on to some invisible path forked prior to 1960? Is the best way to project a candidate on HDTV the best way to project them in low-resolution online. Does it just scale down, or are the approaches fundamentally incompatible?

I guess it's a question for the pundits of the future. Well, the future beginning next month.

Zero?

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Jar Jar Economics

nobody@vox.com(Lee) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:46:18 +0100

"Yeah, well I blame George Lucas."

"Oh for... Well you seem to have been consistantly blaming Lucas for everything bad the last few years. Do tell - how has this creator of fiction caused the current economic crisis?"

"You say that, but the economy itself is a fiction."

"Ok, a Frank Capra angel."

"Yeah, was going to stretch a metaphor around the Force or maybe people not believing in faries, but... nice Darmok. Anyway, you see these guys on the trading floors, high ups in the investment banks. Lot of guys in their 30s."

"Ok, go on."

"So, back in the 90s most of the previous guys in those positions were of cinema attending age in 1977 - when the original Star Wars was released. But a lot of the guys today were either not born or two young to see Star Wars in the cinema. Empire came out in 1980, Jedi in 1983."

"Oh, god. Is this like when you openly mock people for believing in star signs, but then go on to contend that people's attitudes can be determined by who their first Doctor Who was?"

"Your close-minded attitude clearly marks you out as Tom Baker's, but yes, it's very much like that. If you came to Star Wars between 77 and 80, or after 83, you had a very different perspective. Those people had hope - new hope. Their story ended in a very visibly defeated enemy, celebrations, medals, dancing teddy bears, whatever. But for those years between Empire and Jedi... You found out you were adopted and your real dad was a dick, had your hand cut off, your best friend flash frozen. Bleak. Precious little hope ahead. It's got to have some impact. If you were a Star Wars obsessed 12-year-old in 1982, you're a 38-year-old today. And hey, maybe you are managing pension funds or something. It's not even a curve - it's high in 77, drops rapidly in 1980, then shoots back up in 83. Not movie quality, mind you - just the perception on how well the fictional war was going for the good guys."

"Well, three years is a long time in war. Even a star war."

"It's an even longer time in economics."

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Wrapped in the flag

nobody@vox.com(Lee) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 02:45:31 +0100

Captain Britain

After unexpected UK success in this years Olympic games, and the prospect of pouring millions in public funds into the hosting of the next one, sustaining some level of excitement about the Olympics is suddenly the new patriotic duty.

I try, I do. But my first "moment of meh" this time around came with the unveiling of the "Team GB" kit in June. Somehow I've always been disappointed with my national team's kits.

I may not know much about sport but, as a lifelong comic book reader, I know a thing or two about skin tight uniforms. And these days, things like the LZR swimsuit, and those d3o impact-suits (used by Olympic skiers), don't seem to be too far removed from the sort of things being worn in The Ultimates.

Would it not be awesome if Team GB could get the likes of Bryan Hitch and Alan Davis to bring their comic book aesthetics to the British team's kit?

Since he's been the primary illustrator for most of the Captain Britain Corps, who could have more experience designing skin-tight patriotic uniforms than Alan Davis? Exactly, no-one.

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ICANN FAIL

nobody@vox.com(Lee) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:15:37 +0100

I've never been a fan of ICANN. They're a ludicrously costly organsisation whose "authority" stems from administrative stewardship for some of the internet's universal namespaces. As I used to point out: ICANN costs millions to run every year and their job is to make very occasional changes to small text files - a job I'd happily do for a fraction of the cost.

As someone with some background in net-ops I've always understood that the most elegant bootstrap for a distributed, de-centralized, system is a conservative and tightly controlled hierarchical namespace with a minimally small root. Authority for the DNS namespace isn't granted by governments (with the exception of the US Dept of Commerce) or international treaty. There's no real "root" to the authority ICANN that claims, it's “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions” (to use a phrase that others have borrowed from William Gibson).

The authority for management of the DNS namespace is granted by whoever runs the root servers. The root servers are determined by whatever resolvers think they are. The resolvers are usually informed by "root.hints" (a file distributed with Bind) that bootstraps the chain of authority when a nameserver is started.

Who's the kingmaker here? It's just as much the ISC (makers of Bind), as it is the ops staff configuring the nameservers, as it is the company determining their policy of which root to use, as it is the customer complaining he can't send email.

The prevailing attitude is, for the sake of operational sanity, keep using the ICANN root.

Limited experiments in increasing the number of gTLDs (generic top-level domains, as opposed to country-based domains) have been shown to benefit two groups - name registrars and international trademark lawyers - an insignificant number of people as a percentage of Internet users, but whose interests are hugely over-represented at ICANN. I'd argue that, at best, new gTLDs such as .biz have provided no benefit to the public - and are dominated by registrations by either spammers and scammers (hopping from one blacklisted domain to the next) to purely trademark protection registrations. And each new gTLD pulls us further from de-centralization, which (in theory) impacts internet stability.

The theory of "bigger root = less stability" is one I personally subscribe to. Others point to the successful management of ".com", a huge flat namespace, as proof that DNS is robust enough to have a root namespace of millions. They may well be right, but increasing the root of an authoritative namespace like DNS isn't something we can retract. If they're wrong, we're screwed - simple technical clarity that only years of being a grumpy sysadmin can provide.

I've been online on two occasions when the .com servers have failed. My observations at the time were that this did have some knock-on effect to .uk domains - but largely .uk stuff was working fine. Smart hostmasters have authoritative nameservers under at least two different TLDs precisely for this reason. Localization of failure is the benefit of distribution and de-centralization.

With the recent decision by ICANN to flatten the namespace they've shown themselves (in my eyes) to be unsuitable stewards of the root. In my mind (and perhaps others) they're shifting from "de facto root" to merely the "dominant alt-root" - no more legitimate than any other. It's clear that if any authority is going to be claimed, it's going to come from somewhere like the ITU or UN. International bodies like this are, by their nature, slow moving and conservative - exactly what namespace management needs.

And for alt-roots - now is your time. Set up new alt-root servers, grandfather the ICANN root as of this date, then charge hefty administrative fees to include any of the new ICANN-approved domains (registrants can clearly afford it). If you're a large ISP already running a good few resolvers this is a potential new revenue stream - it's practically free money.

In fact I've always suspected it was the secret business plan for OpenDNS.

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Comic chat redux

nobody@vox.com(Lee) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:50:35 +0100

Adventures-in-productivity

Hah. Now every stupid instant messenger conversation I have can be rendered as a poorly conceived anonymous three-panel webcomic. Huzzah. There's still a bit of cut-n-pasting to do, but stripgenerator.com seems to be quick and simple enough.

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Watt the...?

nobody@vox.com(Lee) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:28:45 +0100

Lumen

Why the hell are we still labelling light-bulbs in watts? The energy consumption of a light-bulb is rarely the overriding criteria for choice (otherwise we'd be saving energy by sitting in the dark), it's whether it's bright enough for its intended purpose.

Maybe, back when all commodity household bulbs were incandescents, it was enough to state the wattage. But that hasn't been the case for a few years now. Now, as well as communicating the actual energy consumption, they also need to somehow communicate their level of brightness.

As a subjective property, "brightness" makes for confusing indicia. At the moment all CFL packaging seems to rely on familiarity with the brightness of the incandescent they're presumably replacing. Remember when you were a child? Remember how bright an old fashioned 60W bulb would be? This bulb is as bright as that. Almost.

I'd like to hope that at some point the packaging designers thought to themselves "Hold on a minute, by continuing to market bulbs by wattage we're just compounding the error. What happens if we create even more efficient light-bulbs that are brighter at the same wattage - how do we communicate that?"

Perhaps they'd suggested the obvious solution: switch to using lumens (lm), the SI unit for luminous flux. Light-bulbs already have a lumen rating printed on the box, but usually in tiny type on the bottom. It's already used in the marketing of projector bulbs.

Maybe research was done. Maybe this idea was dismissed as too confusing for the public.

Years from now, it wouldn't surprise me if the EU attempts to standardise us out of this situation. "Back off Brussels," the British tabloids will snarl, "we invented light-bulbs - and if we want to refer to their brightness by comparison with a product no longer legally sold, we'll bloody well do so."

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Donut Plains

nobody@vox.com(Lee) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:15:18 +0100

"My girlfriend is always kicking my arse at Mario Kart DS - the Wii version may be my best chance to claw back some dignity," I say, gripping a white plastic toy steering wheel.

Apparently, in Mario Kart games, having played the first game on the SNES 15 years ago doesn't seem to confer any advantage when pitted against a younger, sharper, mind. In some ways the ideal video-game opponent is someone just slightly better than you. They may win six times out of ten, but the four you win are sweeter for it.

Sadly, I won every race. She blamed her frustration with the new wheel-based controls. My plan had succeeded horribly. My victory was as hollow as the second Wii-wheel I'd suddenly regretted springing for.

(In terms of a review: It's Mario Kart; it's Wii; ergo it's fun. It's probably the best one yet... but incrementally so. In an alternate universe, where Nintendo had released a bad version, I'd be saying "why couldn't they have just released a Wii version of the DS game with extra tracks" but I don't have to - this is essentially that game. Plus, it's got the best element of New Super Mario Bros, the mega-mushroom.)

I did get a chance to check out the online play later. I never really bothered with online play on the DS game. Firstly, I had no interest in "snaking" - the technique where the mini-boost gained from corner drifts can be used at any point. Secondly, on the rare occasion I was actually in the lead in the final lap, the game would mysteriously quit due to my competitors developing unexpected network issues...

Both of these problems are gone from the Wii version (although it now introduces mixed bike and kart races - madness!). The online race experience is slick (by Wii standards). And fun. Of course, since I got my arse handed to me consistently, I think I'll be putting in a little more practice before returning.

The other kind of online experience is the "ghost" challenge for the time-trial mode. I downloaded the ghost-data for the fastest European time on one of the courses and watched it in playback. The ghost-bike keeps pulling wheelies for micro-speed boosts, and takes every corner flawlessly. So maybe if I put in enough time I could try and match him, to eek-off a microsecond somewhere, but would it be fun?

By the time the game is released in the US, I wouldn't be surprised if the times already set by Japanese and European gamers are essentially unbeatable; the optimal paths will have likely been found. You'd just be attempting to replicate actions that have already been recorded. The best chess player born this year has little hope of ever beating the best chess playing computer to be built 20 years from now. Strange game, Professor Falken.

For me, the real fun is in the scrappy races of blue shells, Bullet Bills, those sweet last second victories. And those sweeter last second defeats. Mario Kart Wii has still got these, and for this reason it's worth getting hold of.

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Snow day

nobody@vox.com(Lee) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:19:49 +0100

It snowed in London last night. As made my way down the street I felt a cold wet thud against the back of my head. For the first time in my adult life (that I can recall) I'd been pelted with snowballs by kids. And not the powdery snowballs of my idealised childhood memories - more like balls of icy slush. Slush now dirbbling down my back.

"Bloody kids!" I shouted as they ran away, waving my fist like a grown-up from The Beano. "One day you will be the adults pelted with snowballs. Of course if it happens more frequently as a result of thermohaline circulation shutdown I'll be finding that bittersweet at best."

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Browsing history

nobody@vox.com(Lee) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 15:56:26 +0100

One of the things on my mental radar for 2008 (trends: tea-snobbery and "kaizen") is the mainstreaming of personal statistics - data gaterered about a specific person, presented (primarily) for the use of that same person.

The concept is already famiiar in contexts where information is captured to track progress: "gamer scores", graphs in games such as "Brain Training". Graphs produced by the Nike/iPod device. Weights and calories captured by people following diet plans.

While much of Saul Griffith's recent etech presentation about energy literacy seems familiar to anyone who's seen "An Inconvenient Truth", it's the personal statistics (starting on page 68 of the pdf) that were the most inspiring to me.

But the trend is also for the information to be produced for more esoteric reasons. The visualisations of last.fm data are potentially pretty (stats porn) and seem to adopt the same function as a photo album rather than representing actionable data. ("I note that your Portishead plays are up 15% in the last week - is everything OK?")

Visualised waymarking also seems to be fitting itself into the same space as personal photography. Take a series of lat/long positions and visualise them using a satellite map. Not owning any kind of GPS device, I've never done it myself. Certainly there have been times when the data would have been useful as an aide-mémoire. A sort of meatspace browser history.

But I've already been carrying cellphones almost everywhere for the last decade. They've been geo-locating themselves by periodically checking for the strongest (usually closest) available cell tower. I haven't been recording this data - but my mobile provider has - and they're obliged by law to keep the data for at least 12 months.

If I could go to the website of my phone company and download a csv containing the time and cell identifier that would be enough. I imagine the lat/long identifers for the cells are already known, it wouldn't take someone too long to produce a mash-up to turn my phone data into a rough explorable waymark.

I should be able to use the Data Protection Act to request this information already. But according to an article in The Guardian yesterday, it doesn't look like the phone companies are going to play ball:

"The phone companies are effectively saying: 'No, that's commercially sensitive and extraordinarily valuable data, and we're not giving it away on principle, so we'll just make up a justification.' What you got back was a pretty thin excuse, but given the history of these things, it doesn't surprise me."

So how long will it be before automatic waymarking visualisation is pitched as a consumer-level service by phone companies?

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