Greggman.com Category (news)

TED Talks

It seems maybe I'm the last to know but I just found out about TED Talks. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is apparently a conference bringing together people from all different disciplines to share their ideas and inspire each other.

Those talks are available online at www.ted.com and they extremely inspiring. They are each only allowed to be up to 20 minutes so they are very easy to watch or listen to. So far of the ones I've watched these were the most inspiring for me.

Alan Russell: Why can't we grow new body parts? O.....M.....G! Star Trek medicine is HERE!

Jeff Hawkins: Brain science is about to fundamentally change computing. I hope he succeeds!

Carolyn Porco: Fly me to the moons of Saturn. She is so passionate you can't help but be infected with her enthusiasm.

Vilayanur Ramachandran: A journey to the center of your mind.

Theo Jansen: The art of creating creatures. This guy is crazy! He's making self running robots that run on wind power.

I still have many to hear. Check them out and tell me your favorites!

CatalogChoice.org

I found out about this site called CatalogChoice.org who is trying to make it easier to opt out of receiving catalogs in the mail. According to them more than 19 BILLION catalogs are mailed out each year. I know that I rarely want the catalogs I get in the mail. Some companiese are particularly agressive and send a new catalog every 2 weeks. I even get catalogs for about 6 previous tenants.

If you are getting catalogs you don't want here's a very simple way to cancel them.

Site Moved?

It looks like it's finally moved. I've turned comments and the forum back on. I'll cross my fingers things are all working again.

Japan according to Hilton Hotels

My friend 6955 showed me this yesterday....What's wrong with this picture?

Here's a closer look. According to Hilton, this is Japan

Tokyo and Narita are practically a 1/3 of the country apart from each other even though they are actually in the same area? Tokyo and Tokyo Bay are some how magically on opposite sides of the country? Osaka is on the southern tip? And does that look anything like Japan?

Here's a map of Japan

It might seem like a small matter but come on, would it be okay if they had a map of the USA with New York on the West Coast and JFK Airport somewhere near Maine. No, it wouldn't.

Facebook Sucks

Facebook seriously sucks. I don't really understand how it got as big as it supposedly is. I can't connect with the person sitting directly in front of me because Facebook only lets me search for people who have registered in the same company, or college. WTF!

Honestly I really want nothing to do with Facebook. In Japan there is a service called Mixi. It's arguably 2 or 3 times the size of Facebook at least in terms of market penetration. Where as MySpace seems to be mostly high school students and Facebook mostly college students, Mixi covers the entire population in Japan. And, there is are no restrictions on who you can connect with. Meet someone at Starbucks and ask them if they are on Mixi then connect if you want. No need to be in the same school or company.

Mixi does some things which would seem to work against it. It's 100% closed from the rest of the net. You must log in to see any of it so it's not searchable by any of the search engines (Yahoo, Google, etc...)

One interesting feature of Mixi is called "footprints". It basically shows a list of the last 50 or so people that looked at your page. I think it sparks conversation. It feels good to know one of your friends was checking out your blog even if they didn't leave a comment.

Anyway, in Japan, Mixi is almost a part of life for most people it seems. So, the only real reason I'm on Facebook is because a couple of Japanese friends, who I assume are under the mistaken impression that Facebook is like Mixi in the states, are trying to reproduce their Mixi activities on Facebook. As such they end up trying to direct all correspondence through Facebook as they would have with Mixi in Japan.

Oh well. I hope someone comes and replaces Facebook with a service that doesn't suck.

Popup Ads, Pop Behind Ads. Good or Evil? (part 1)

Popup ads and pop behind ads. I thought they were universally loathed. They have been the topic of quite a few comedy sketches. A few famous ones are the Dave Chappelle skit about a world where popups appear in real life. Conan O'Brian's staff trip to India which starts off with them and another I remember off the top of my head is Interfection from Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

So, my question to you is. Do you hate popups and pop behind ads? Are they bad or do you care?

Wii Geography Lessons

Those of you that have a Nintendo Wii probably know that it has a News feature. It's kind of neat in that it shows the articles and shows a marker on a 3d globe map of the world where the story takes place.

Unfortunately it leaves a little to be desired in terms of matching the names of places to their actual places on the globe.

So much for Nintendo being a positive influence on children :-p

Don't get mugged at GDC

2 years ago 4 of my friends at Sega got mugged the day they arrived in San Francisco for the Game Devlepers Conference. One of them got a broken tooth and a concussion.

I don't know San Francisco that well yet but in the interest of trying to prevent something like that happening again here's a map.

Consider the red areas places my best guess at places you should not go. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be careful everywhere but those areas in particular seem more dangerous.

The Secret Life of Machines

I don't know how long they'll be up but if you've never seen them check out The Secret Life of Machines on Google Video.

The Secret Life of Machines is a program that aired on the BBC in the late 80s, early 90s that explains how lots of machines work in super simple ways. It also used to run on the Discovery channel. It's crazy how simple some machines really are. One example, they make a tape recorder by showing that if you put rust on a piece of tape and manually run it across a recording head it will record on to the rust.

Some of the cooler ones:

Did you know the Fax Machine was invented in 1843 over 160 years ago and the first working fax machine was made in 1860! It's older than the telephone.

The refrigerator was actually invented to chill beer!

One I also found very interesting is the one about the Sewing Machine. First off I didn't know how they worked but more interesting to me was some of the history of clothing.

According to the program except for very rich people, most families used to have to make their own clothing and that included up until relatively recently. They show some ads from like the 1950s for women and sewing machines. My mom used to make clothing for us. I used to always think it was just a hobby and I'm sure it was but I wouldn't doubt that hobby was influenced by the previous generation that might have grown up making their own clothing.

The sewing machine also made it possible for there to be a wide spread fashion industry which is also what made it less of a fixture in people's households.

There's actually quite a few sites about the show. The webpage of the main guy, Tim Hunkin. Dang that guy is amazing! He even runs a homepage for the show.
Each episode is about 25 minutes. I hope they stay available. I wish they'd make some new ones too :-)

Gifts for older Video Game Fans

I wish I had found Etsy before Christmas

The Moist Towelettes

My friend Dave and his friends Emi, Yuko and Mike have a new band, the Moist Towelettes. They kind of sound like Puffy AmiYumi. Check'em out.

PS: They sound even better better live. They need some better captures of their songs for their myspace site.

Windows Live Writer clones Tanjun'ka, Hooray

Actually I'm very happy about this. Almost 2 years ago I set out to create Tanjun'ka to solve the problems of quickly posting images on my blog. I got it to a workable state but development kind of came to stand still. You can read about it on the Tanjun'ka dev blog

Well, today or a couple of days ago Microsoft released what is basically the same product called Windows Live Writer solving the same issues in nearly the same way.

I'm glad they are doing it because it Tanjun'ka development stopped and no one ever even noticed it existed.

Windows Live Writer is only beta but a few comments.

They figured out a reasonable way to handle uploading graphics in both a small and large size together. I like their method. I thought about that a long time and was frustrated trying to come up with a solution. My issue was I wanted you to be able to edit both pictures separately. For example the thumbnail might just be one person's face where as the large picture might be the picture of an entire party of people. Still, the way they have it probably covers most people's needs.

I hope they add in Crop. They got rotate, and dynamic resizing but cropping is basically the number one thing I do to a picture before uploading. It's in Tanjun'ka. Of course without Crop the problem mentioned in the previous paragraph doesn't exist.

Not wanting to have to do too much work I was stuck relying on IE's HTML editor which is pretty crap. Windows Live Writer wrote their own so they can do a better job then I could so editing is nicer and their HTML isn't as crappy.

Windows Live Writer's spelling checker sucks. So does Tanjun'ka's. It's just that this is Microsoft, the company that introduced realtime spell checking so it would be awesome if they could ultimately add that so it worked like Word with red underlines for bad wordds.

Anyway, Windows Live Writer supports plugins I suspect we'll see lots of them that cover these features.

Now if we can just get a similar product so Wikis can have real wysiwyg editing with drag and drop images. It shouldn't be too hard using the same protocols except that editing previous entries becomes a much bigger problem than it is on blogs.

Oh, one more thing. Windows Live Writer supports standards so you can use it with any blogging system that supports those standards like Moveable Type, WordPress, Blogger, etc. Contrast this to Google's tools like Picasa or the Google Toolbar that only work with Google's stuff, Google doesn't support standards.

Baby Clothes

My friend Sakura is designing clothes now. If you've got a baby check them out and order some :-)

Please Help Me Identify Some Music

I'm trying to find a couple of songs I heard at a show the other day. One is Japanese or maybe it's a Japanese remake of an English song. The other is Spanish I think. I recorded a short segment of each song with my camera. If you happen to know the names of the songs please post them below. I'd really like to find them.

Song #1: Don't Need Any Love

Song #2: Spanish Song

(Fixed the links)

Sleipnir

Everyone has heard of Firefox and many have heard of Opera but how many of you have heard of Sleipnir? I have no idea what their actual marketshare is but if I was to go by looking at my co-workers for the last 2 years it would be something like 90%.

Splitting my site

I just split my site into blog.greggman.com and games.greggman.com. I kind of see it as, games, is my game development oriented site. A place for me to discuss and bring up game and career related things. The blog site is more personal. Of course feel free to read either, both or neither but it seemed to me that I needed to separate the two. I'd prefer if I'm discussing game development that and someone wants to look me up they can concentrate on game dev related stuff and skip the "looking for a girlfriend" stuff. I hope it works out.

I'm sure there will be some rough edges and bugs. All the old URLs should still work. One big change though, I switched comments to being listed oldest to newest (the opposite of what they used to be). I believe at the time I started comments on this system which way was more common had not really be decided but now as pretty much all comment systems go oldest to newest I've been told more than once it's confusing the opposite way so I switched them to be like everyone else.

Feeds for the 2 sites are separate. Stuff I post on one should not enter the RSS feed of the other so if you want the game related stuff in Bloglines or some other RSS reader you'll need to add that feed.

SkyScout

This seems like something out of a Scifi movie. It's a gadget you hold up to your eye, look for a star in the sky and it will tell you about that star supposedly including all kinds of info, even audio. You can also request a star and it will guide you to it. Its memory is upgradable and its got an SD slot for even more data.

To bad they don't have video of how it actually looks inside while using it.

The Most Dangerous Ideas

Slashdot had a link today to an article entitled "What's your most dangerous idea?" posed to 100 scientists. Here's a few I found interesting. How about you?

Hopefully I'll summerize these okay. Here it goes.

Terrence Sejnowski says the Internet will eventually become Skynet (as in self aware). He's go some stats which suggest it's probable.

Jaron Lanier has an interesting one that humans, inside a virtual reality simulation have no problem learning to adapt to using a non-human body. Like a body with 5 arms instead of 2 or 6 legs. So, the question is, when science actually allows us to do these things either in VR or even in the real world through genetic engineering or robotics what will the world be like?

Irene Pepperberg's Idea is that basically it will be proven there is no real difference between humans and other animals. Currently most people believe there are some specific differences between humans and other animals. Like the idea that we can think or we can comtemplate our own existance or we can use tools. Whatever it is we use this idea to separate ourselves from animals. But, what if it can be proven there is no specific difference except one of ammount. In other words instead of an animal not having whatever specific traits make us special, instead they have those traits just at a lesser level.

Douglas Rushkoff has one which I might sum up as because of tech, more and more people bartering instead of using money. I'll fix your computer if you take a look at my tonciles. The dangerous part I guess is how the government and banks become less relevent if everyone is going around them.

Juan Enriquez wonders if Tech will destroy the USA. His argument seems to be that basically all countries die eventually and so is the USA still a kid, in middle age or in old age and is tech extending its life or shortening it. He's got some interesting stats to argue it's not inconceivable.

Geoffery Miller has an interesting one. I don't think I knew (or I forgot) about Fermi's Paradox. It basically says, if the universe is as old as we think it is, and if life happens on other planets in the same kind of time frame has it happen on Earth then there should argablely be lots of aliens. If so, where the hell are they? Either the odds of life are a lot smaller then we believe OR they all some how didn't make it (blew themselves up or whatever). Read his article for what he thinks might be up.

Judith Rich Harris has a scary one which is that there is mounting evidence that parents have zero influence over their kids and how they will turn out.

Freeman Dyson has one I mentioned before which is that advancing tech will make manipulating genes as simple as manipulating computer code is today. The danger being that tomorrows gene hackers will make real viruses just like today's computer hackers make computer viruses and end up killing off the world.

Jeremy Bernstein has one which I'd like more info on. Basically he says we don't understand Plutonium and that all the bombs that use it could explode at anytime without warning.

Clay Shirky and several other people suggested we will prove we have no free will and that will change what we can hold people accountable for as well as other ramifications.

James O'Donnell talks about how goverment will disappear as people get less and less dependent of the things government has traditionally provided. It's not clear how this is a dangerous idea.

Matt Ridley has a related one which is that it's proven government is the problem, not the solution. I tend to agree. It's also not clear how this is a dangerous idea.

J. Craig Venter and several others say will are on the road to proving genes determine your behavior, something most people would rather not know and there are quite a few dangers in knowing but that we will know relatively soon and so we'd better get ready to deal with this new knowledge.

I hope I didn't do a too poor a job in summerizing some of those. They certainly are thought provoking.

Really Simple Sharing. NOT!

Ray Ozzie, a guy that works at Microsoft, posted about a new standard he and his group are proposing for sharing data like contact lists, task lists, calendars etc called. Really Simple Sharing

I only glanced at the spec for a few seconds but as far as I can tell it's really missing the point. Maybe there is time to fix it I hope.

I've thought about this in the past because I've actually wanted to do this for a while. I wanted to make something that would let me sync my home outlook calendar, tasks, contacts with my work Notes calendar, tasks, contacts and my cell phone. Most of the sync software out there is not very happy with syncing across more than 2 devices. Also, few of them sync across the web (required for office to home) and those that do generally require a pay for service which is scary. Who wants someone else to have access to your contact lists or your calendar (they'd know when to come rob your house for example). So, I wanted to write some open source software you could install on your own server or website if you wanted to run it yourself or you could pay me if you didn't want to be bothered (data encrypted of course). Think movabletype vs typepad.

Anyway, that's not the real problem.

The real problem is not just syncing. The real problem is updating across systems that support different things. For example, my cell phone's calendar supports an item name, date-time, place, and several alarm settings. Outlook on the other hand supports an INFINITE AMOUNT OF DATA PER ITEM! You can categorize items, you can add custom fields, those fields can themselves be fields of fields. Some fields might be specific enumerations. Go look at all the info you can put in an Outlook contact vs a typical cellphone contact.

The real problem is not sharing your contacts or calendars. There is plenty of software to do that. The real problem is that they don't all contain the same data so keeping them in sync his not as simple has Ray's standard suggests.

So, here is a typical usage that no one handles and that neither Ray's suggestion handles. You have a contact in outlook with some of it's zillion fields. Name, Company, Address, Phone #, Email, Webpage, Birthday, Department, Manager's name, Assistant's name. You sync to your cellphone which only handles, Name, Phone #, Email. You meet them and they tell you they have a new phone number so you edit in it your cell phone. You come home, sync and now your outlook has lost their Address, Webpage, Department, etc etc etc. :-(

The real problem that needs to be solved is not updating by item but updating by field. Cellphones are never going to be as flexible as Outlook is for Tasks, Contacts and Calendar items. In fact no other system I know of is as flexible. Notes certainly isn't so just syncing between Outlook and Notes or Notes and Thunderbird is going to have all kinds of problems that Ray's suggestion is not going to fix.

The only solution I could think of was to have a server (it could be running on your home machine, your website or a paid service). The server would record an item and all the fields. When sending an item to another piece of software it would also keep a record of what it sent and and how it endup up being stored by having the receiving software send back a response. That way, if it got an item back (an update) it could check which fields changed and only update those fields. Since it would have a record of ALL fields no fields would ever be lost.

Here's a concrete example. I make a new calendar entry in Outlook with name, time and category. When I sync to the server Outlook would send something like

id: "outlook at home"
name: "Dinner with Keiko"
time: 2005-12-15 7:00:00pm
category: project XYZ
updatetime: 2005-12-10 06:15:03pm

when my PDA connects to get the latest items it would receive

name: "Dinner with Keiko"
time: 2005-12-15 7:00:00pm
category: project XYZ
updatetime: 2005-12-10 06:15:03pm

then it would immediately send back any parts it understands as it stored them. Since my PDA software can't handle the "category" field and it only supports 15 letter names and since it doesn't support seconds it would send back this response.

id: "gman's PDA"
name: "Dinner with Kei"
time: 2005-12-15 7:00pm

The server would record that "gman's PDA" stored "name" as "Dinner with Kei" and time as "2005-12-15 7:00pm".

2 days later I get a call from Keiko while out and she needs to change the time to 8:00pm. So I update it on my PDA. When the PDA contacts the server it would send

id: "gman's PDA"
name: "Dinner with Kei"
time: 2005-12-15 8:00pm

The server can now figure out I didn't update the "name" field so my outlook will still say "Dinner with Keiko" not "Dinner with Kei". The server also knows not to delete the "category" field.

Of course that's just the tip of the iceburg because systems like Outlook suppose infinite customization all of which needs to be synced.

No, my solution is not simple. But honestly this is what NEEDS to happen for things to "Just work" because otherwise software that's less capable (most software) will lose important data when syncing with software that is more capable making anything but the most very basic stuff un-syncable. The standard suggested by Mr. Ozzie does not actually solve a real problem. All it does is try to provide a standard for the current ways of syncing. Those ways already exist they are just not standard, "Really Simple Sharing" would not fix any of the real problems.

So, there you go, free idea. Since I've got too many other things to do please make it so I can use it :-)

Pandora

I guess the current topic of discusion is Pandora. It's site that you type in a musical artists's name or a song name and it will play music that's supposed to be similar. I think really the only thing that makes it interesting is it's free. I tried it and it failed pretty miserably to provide similar music.

First I tried Pizzicato Five. It gave me Bizzare, Inc. (house music), Taylor Dayne (gospel house?), Brazillian Girls (mellow house). All WRONG!

I tried Moocheba it gave me a bunch of groups that sounded like acoustical alternative , t.A.T.u (WTF?), Amy Grant (Super WTF!?). My first choice would have been like Sneaker Pimps

I tried Massive Attack I got Darediablo (heavy metal, WTF!)

So, I tried it on Rhapsody They have a similar service called create your own radio station where you can enter up to 9 artists and it will play them and similar music.

I tried Pizzicato Five and got perfect matches, Kihimi Karie, Cornelius, Fantastic Plastic Machine. I tried Moorcheba and got Sneaker Pmps, Lamb, Zero 7, all perfect matches. I tried Massive Attack and again perfect matches. Portishead, Hooverphonic etc.

What was your experience?