diego's weblog

the end of the mechanical age

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:35:24 -0800

Anyone that knows me also knows that I am tablet fan. My first job out of college was at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center creating a user interface for a tablet that never shipped (this was 1998!) even though we got it working in prototype form. I have used tablets of various kinds since then -- my main portable computer was a Thinkpad X Tablet until the Macbook Air came out and replaced it. (yep, 1 lb lighter plus much faster wake time is just too much of a difference to ignore, tablet or no tablet) While much has been said about the iPad, both pro and con, on the negative side the focus seems to be on what it doesn't do. For those that would have wanted to get a tablet mac, as opposed to a big iphone (and I think of the iPad not as a big iPhone, but I think of the iPhone as a small iPad, if you get what I mean), there's no argument that would bring them over. The iPad simply doesn't do what they want, and that's ok. There's also been a lot of commentary on how much of a controlled environment it is, how it can't be hacked, and so on. All of those are in my view good points but somewhat beside the point. Since the thing clearly isn't meant to be a general purpose computer, it is not that helpful to say that it isn't and to want it to be one. It's not a general purpose computer, and Apple never said it would be one. Done. Let's all get over that. What I find interesting is not so much what it does or doesn't do, but in what it is in terms of its construction as far as bigger devices go, and the consequences for software/hardware interfaces. It seems to me that Apple is on a mission to lead the age of glass -- no mechanical components, or as few of those as you could possibly get away with, and increased control of the physical interactions by the software, to create interfacing modes on the fly. From its screen all the way to the casing, the iPad is almost a solid block of metallic particles arranged in various ways, glass, and some plastic. If we had molecular assemblers (or maybe when is a better term) this is what I think the a lot of first products would look like. Arguably, it was the iPhone that really broke ground here, and Apple has really been going in this direction for a while now. Macbooks now look like a slab of metal. Desktops (of all kinds, from the Mini to the MacPro) have this solid look that hides all the mechanisms that make it work. They generally seem to be sculpted, not assembled. Compare that to PCs, which actually do look assembled even if they're now more streamlined. Apple's products are tightly controlled, but that also means they are tightly integrated. Apple is fusing the software with the device beyond anything else done in the computer/tablet/phone market today. The hardware is an extension of the software, and viceversa. They are one unit. We have been infusing electronics and software into everything mechanical for decades now, putting software inside straightjackets of metallic hinges and spring mechanisms with rigid I/O interfaces (input through keyboard, output through display, and so on). It is really in consumer devices where interfaces blend more naturally into form and function. In modern cars (particularly mid- to high-end) the integration of software, processing units, memory, and storage, is fairly seamless as far as car functionality goes (the often times horrible integration of touchscreens and entertainment functions is another story). We don't really think about it until something goes wrong. This is one of the key areas in which Apple has pulled off a significant shift. Microsoft tried, for years, to bolt new form factors and ways of interaction into an already bloated system of concepts, software and hardware approaches (the PC). The quality of Windows aside, that's why Windows tablets don't work -- and as long as Microsoft insists on shoving 40-year-old interaction paradigms and 20-year old software into various devices and form factors, it never will. Nor will Linux, or any other random PC OS anyone can come up with for that matter. This new paradigm requires a redesign from the ground up. And to really pull it off, you need the hardware to blend into the background, not to get constantly in the way, calling attention to itself, and to become malleable. For that, you need the materials and the design to match them organically. Thinking of the device as a single unit, rather than disparate components to be mixed and matched, is what lets you achieve that. Which in turn allows software to really become the ghost in the machine, and to start to take control of the physical realm of the actions -- creating physical interactions, like swiping, out of thin air, rather than having to rely on hinges and springs (like, say, a mouse or a keyboard) to communicate highly limited interactions. The Mechanical Age is at an end. The Software Age is just beginning.

the web is an app

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 06:05:45 -0800

I've been thinking a lot recently about what apps mean for web development, and how they intersect, and my conclusion so far is that very soon web apps will always be built... as apps. What do I mean by this? Apps are user interfaces optimized for a particular device or screen, and they communicate with servers purely through APIs. Web servers for apps never serve HTML content directly -- they expose REST APIs that render JSON (or, alternatively, XML). It used to be that for typical website development you would create a website that connected to a data source (conceptually -- naturally there's a lot more going on) to generate HTML. Inevitably, pages would end up mangling at least some amount of back-end data management (no MVC model is perfect), and the server defined what to render depending on the capabilities of the user's browser. Then, to create an app (typically for iPhone or Android), you would create a separate access path with APIs that would also connect to the data store. The result is two separate sets of business logic that over time become a pain to maintain, or a complex rearchitecture project that involves pulling the business logic out of the web app code so that it can be moved to a separate library or codebase that can be shared by both the APIs and the web app code. Now, taking into account some interesting, very solid trends:

The increasing power of browsers in handling more complex logic, and new APIs (for runtime, data, semantics, and display) provided by HTML5
The imminent demise of IE 6 (let's hope) and increasingly tiny market share of other older and less capable browsers
The continued improvement of solid web client-side development frameworks, like GWT and SproutCore.

Put all of these together, and it has become perfectly feasible, and I'd say preferred, to build a web app as just another app, albeit one written entirely in JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5. In this scenario, the "website" is really one static HTML file that initializes the JavaScript code, which dynamically decides what is the appropriate set of libraries and client code to pull from the server. Once the client is initialized, it can authenticate via OAuth or similar to the APIs, just like any other app client does, and will afterwards only talk to the server via the REST APIs. This results in a very different front-facing architecture for websites from what we've gotten used to (and the change ripples out significantly to backend architecture as well). You can just load up an Apache instance or two to have comfortable static file serving capability, and the entire dynamic front end becomes a set of APIs that is shared across all devices -- including PC browsers. The backend becomes simpler to build and maintain, because there's zero display logic embedded in it. It's just a data interface. This has big implications for how we build websites and webservices. Designing a website as a giant API is not something common (APIs are generally bolted on later). Frameworks like Rails teach people to think in terms of pages, not function calls, which is what web requests become when the website is only an API. Libraries like Jersey and Atmosphere will become more important than Spring, since most of what you need is already there, and they're simpler. Also affected are how we handle everything from outages to Operations, since load balancing and failure handling become different in a world where the user interface components (served as static HTML) have much, much lower probability of failure than the dynamic data components, and a lot more data can be handled statically as well. Major services are already evolving in this direction. Google has led the way for deploying these ideas at scale, with rich web apps like Gmail or Google Reader. Unsurprisingly, GWT itself has this model as the centerpiece of how they approach software design. This also intertwines with the topic of "hybrid apps" as I call them -- apps that provide native shells that nevertheless use an embedded browser to handle a lot of common behavior (e.g. on the iOS platform, The App Store, Netflix, and other apps are really just shells for webkit) -- but that's a topic for another post. :)

the missing predators

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:14:33 -0800

Over the weekend I saw Predators (fairly entertaining, if slightly slow in the reveal for some portions of the story). I don't think I'll ruin anything by saying that in this movie we meet a new caste of predators that we've never seen before, a sort of super-predator that kinda slaps around the original predator as if they are oversized calamari with dreadlocks.

All the while, I couldn't help but think that there's a lot missing from the Predator universe. Here's some predator types I'd like to see in a future sequel:

Insurance Agent Predator. Kills slowly by burying you under a ton of forms. Only wears glasses in the office. For all of the regular predators that go on safari... they clearly need insurance products. Especially in case they need to activate the mini-nuke they have in their funky wristband (What is that thing by the way? And does it support bluetooth headsets?)
Janitor Predator. Given the mess they make with the skulls and the spines and all the weird creatures they hunt, they definitely need someone to clean up those spaceships. Does not kill, but if you piss him off you'll be cleaning up your own garbage.
Software Developer Predator (aka Nerd Predator). Can kill with keyboard or strangle with mouse cord. Definitely a necessary addition -- these guys keep hunting stuff, but who is building new versions of the software they use in the spaceships and all their wonderful machinery? who updates the firmware for the ships? do predators have their own engadget? do they have open source? Do their ships run Windows XP?
Gas Station Predator. Because they must get their fuel somewhere.
Celebrity Predator. they must have celebrities, right? right? I mean, they are a natural byproduct of any advanced narcissistic civilization.
Paparazzi Predator. inescapable followup to celebrity predator. Uses a Nikon to kill its prey.
William Gibson Predator. Great predator-writer. Wrote the seminal book in a science fiction genre that deals with a dystopian reality where predators live in peace with the universe and ride little ponies to work, which consists mostly of tending to endless fields of tiny beautiful flowers and contemplating the beauty of the universe.
James Bond Predator. Has a license to kill. Unlike the other predators, who don't ... but kill anyway.
Dentist Predator. Flossing optional for these guys.
Clown Predator. Provides entertainment in long trips, and between orgies of planetary destruction.

Proposed title for next movie? The Real Spacemen Predators of New Jersey.

That is all.

the problem with iPhone 4 (and it's not what you think)

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 18:50:34 -0800

"Do you like your iPhone 4?" I've heard this question more than a few times in the two weeks since I got it, and I imagine I'm not alone. I've owned and used as my primary phone every iPhone since the original but for the first time the answer to this question, surprisingly, has been a bit more ambivalent than in previous years. It's gone from a clear "Yes" to a more measured "Yes, but..." The ambivalence is not a factor of any of the functions or even the features. The display is amazing. It's fast. Call quality is better, at least for me. Batter life is much better. And did I say the display is amazing? So these are all great, what's the problem? No, it has nothing to do with the antenna signal issue, annoying as that is. The device itself is gorgeous to look at too... but that's the thing. Apple has always built devices that maintain a good balance between being visually striking and being generally ergonomic (in the broadest sense). With the iPhone 4, for the first time, this balance has shifted. The iPhone 4, somehow, feels as if it lacks a certain sense of humanity, or rather, it seems to not care very much if it's something that humans actually use. Why? Let me run down the list: with the curved back gone, you can't tell which way it's facing by touch, and short of trying to find the groove of the home button you can't even tell if it's up or down, and the lack of any clear place to grab it from makes it trickier to get in an out of pockets. If you, like me, and I suspect many others, try to pocket your phone with the back facing outwards, in case you run into something, you can no longer do this without thinking, making something that normally you wouldn't even be aware of feel onerous. The hard edges, the slippery nature of its ultra-polished surface materials, its thickness, and its geometry conspire to make it hard to set on a desk or pick up (in fact, the iPhone bumper, which everyone focuses on for solving the antenna signal problem, seems to me to be something built precisely to alleviate that problem -- and the bumper itself then gets in the way, since you can no longer use the dock for syncing). If you had to design a mobile phone so that it would be difficult to pick up, this is how you'd do it. These are all rules for affordances that phones, especially mobile phones, have established, and there are solid reasons behind them. And the iPhone 4 gleefully breaks them all. Like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the iPhone 4 seems to be content with just sitting there and radiating a sense of self-assured perfection. This is important, I think, not just because of Apple's massive market share, but because of the host of copycat manufacturers that seem to match everything Apple does without thinking twice. Apple designs have impact far beyond users of its products. Now, after a couple of weeks, I'm a bit more at peace with these problems, but they'll never go entirely away. And we can always hope that iPhone 5 will put us puny humans back in the equation.

the web is not the browser (redux)

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 07:44:53 -0800

A few years back one discussion that was all the rage was whether mobile phones could or couldn't supplant PCs as web browsing devices. In 2009, that is taken as a given. Mobile browsers (Safari Mobile, Opera Mini, Skyfire, even, ahem, IE on WinMo) have become pretty good at what they do. The web experience has migrated into high end phones successfully, or as successfully as one would expect while retaining the browser metaphor. But therein lies the problem. I far prefer (and I don't think I'm alone in this) browsing twitter through, say, Tweetie on the iPhone than through a browser. And while not a regular Facebook user, I also prefer to use the Facebook iPhone app to the site itself. No doubt the seamless interaction enabled by the iphone plays a role here, but Android, Blackberrys, S60 phones, and even, yes, Windows Mobile phones (mostly thanks to Samsung and HTC) all have apps that somehow pull us in more effectively than their web counterparts. While every once in a while I end up looking at an embedded browser within whatever app I'm using, or occasionally I may load Safari, most of the time I don't. I would even say that I avoid loading the browser if I can. What's going on here? We think of form as function. We conflate 'web' with 'html'. Or even html and (gasp) CSS. In other words: We confuse the web with the browser. What the mobile app renaissance sparked by the iPhone app store is showing is that there's a whole set of tasks and modes of use that don't really lend themselves well to a browser. Some of it, surely, is reverse causality. We do them in a certain way because that's what the phone allows and then it becomes natural to to them in that way, and we shouldn't confuse natural use with designed use. Twitter is perhaps like that. But the Facebook app example and others show that what started as a pure web app can find a more comfortable home in modes of interaction that are not browser-centric. It's not the first time this has happened, or, even, that I make this point: see this post from 2003 the web is not the browser, in which case I was making the argument for RSS, readers, and such. (Yes, I repeat myself. But always in style). HTML 5 is, I believe, trying to react to this trend. I personally cringe at the idea of HTML 5 and the boondogle it's becoming. It's trying to do things that should be better left for other things. Maybe it is another standard of markup. Maybe it is another standard of something else entirely. For example: The progress element. HTML trying to be a UI language. But It's not. So many of HTML's roots are part of the browser that the browser's "box" is inescapable, and trying to make these new experiences into the confines of the browser model will just ensure that it's both modern and irrelevant. The future of the web is in the mix of browsers and apps, feeds (Atom, RSS), and ad hoc REST services. A lot of it will happen through interfaces other than a web browser. And that's ok. The fabric that is the web will be all the better for it, and so will we.

the story of 'the plan'

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 12:38:10 -0800

I've been writing a little bit (again) this past week -- or, rather, doing mostly editing of things I wrote over the last few years but somehow never got around to finish. I'm going to be publishing them through Amazon (Createspace for dead-tree versions and the Amazon Digital Text Platform for Kindle versions). Each has its own challenges, especially formatting. In the case of the print version, I continue to be amazed at the difference font makes in how we perceive what we read, and I've now learned more about Serif fonts than I care to mention, but I digress... So, without further ado, here's the first one for kindle & iphone (through the kindle iphone app): The Plan. Go get it! :-) I wrote the first version of The Plan in Spanish in December 1999 as a sort of episodic novel that I sent around to a group of friends from Argentina over email, every day. It was, as these things usually are, written mostly for my own entertainment (and that of my friends :)). At first I wasn't sure where I was going with it but over time the characters became a bit more formed and in the end I took all the emails and re-wrote it as a book. But it was still in Spanish. Fast-forward a few years and when I started blogging it occurred to me to start Plan B, a 'blognovel' (and yeah, I coined the term, not that it caught on that much beyond a small set of mentions). The Wikipedia entry for "blog fiction" mentions my musings while working on it though. Like with The Plan, I wasn't sure where Plan B was going at the beginning but I started out from the idea of basically following the same character a few years after the events of The Plan, and Plan B contains a bunch of scattered references to its, um, prequel, and near the end it becomes clear that the genesis for the events of Plan B lay with what happened in The Plan a few years earlier. Of course, at that point no one could get The Plan or even knew of its existence. So after writing Plan B (which, as an aside, was left unfinished online due to, well, finishing the thesis, starting a company and all that, but I've now completed it and will complete republishing it) I came back to The Plan and rewrote it in English, this time with the followup of Plan B firmly in mind. The styles of writing, while similar, don't exactly match since The Plan is really intended as a verbal narrative whereas Plan B is straight-out first-person writing, which I meant to use as a subtle device to show the evolution of the character. I think over the last few years I've re-read (and tinkered) with The Plan a two or three times, and now after this final edit I came to the conclusion that this was it and I should either abandon it or publish it. So here it is. If a few people enjoy it, then it will be worth it. :) PS: I'll also be publishing Plan B in the near future, but with a change to the title. Plan B will remain online but the re-published version will be expanded (a 'director's cut' if you will!). PPS: There is also another novel that I'm finishing editing. This one way more ambitious, complicated, and generally a lot darker. That one will come after these two are out. :)

watchmen (the movie): too good for its own good

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:38:01 -0800

Could Alan Moore have been both right and wrong at the same time? This is what I keep asking myself a few days after seeing Watchmen. The anticipation for this movie, certainly among the graphic novel nerds like myself, was probably matched in recent memory only by The Dark Knight. Zack Snyder & Co. clearly went through an herculean effort to remain as true as possible to the source material. Everything is there: as good and sometimes better as you could have imagined it. The complexity of the story remains untouched, and given what the book was this is, to me, nothing short of astonishing. Even the change to the ending, with the now-famous removal of the squid, is definitely an improvement. The squid may have been ok in the 80s, but these days... it just wouldn't fly. And yet... as the movie was ending I felt a bit exhausted. The story is, clearly, simply too much to cram into two and and a half hours unfiltered. Maybe it would be better suited to be a miniseries (Battlestar Galactica comes to mind as an example). The best way I can describe it is by using the oft-abused metaphor of drinking from a firehose. But even as it blasted your brain with raw data, Watchmen also felt somehow ... surgical. Not that it had no soul, but, perhaps, that it had simply borrowed the book's soul without developing one of its own. More importantly, I was just sad. Not because the movie leaves you sad, but because I was immediately convinced that the movie would be a commercial failure (I still am). Why? Well, I knew the story really, really well going in. And even so, it was almost an effort to keep up and take it all in. Every scene, every sequence, was dense with references, in-jokes, subtext, and, of course, the time-jumping criss-crossing plotlines. I tried to think what would someone who hadn't read the book, who wasn't as much into multi-level, dense meta-plotlines (read: most people), would take away from the movie, and if they would enjoy it at all. No, not all movies have to be blockbusters. But let's face it: when you spend $150 MM to make a movie and then (at least) $50 MM to market it, and you basically spend over a year splattering trailers all over TV, cable, newspapers, and the interweb, that's what you're angling for. And in that, Watchmen fails miserably. It is not, in my opinion, making the story accessible to a wider audience which is part of what movies like this one are supposed to do. Which brings me back to where I started. Moore famously stated that Watchmen was "inherently unfilmable". We have the movie now, which proves the literal part of that statement wrong. But in staying true to the story as it was, in all of its complexity and overwhelming fury, it shows that it hasn't made it more accessible at all -- if anything, it's become less accessible since you can't just savor it: once you enter the theater you have to take it all in, beginning to end. So the movie becomes less a movie than a live-action version of what we already had, failing to become a unique entity on its own right. The alternative, chopping up the story to turn it into a marketable movie, would have also eviscerated it, negating the reason for doing the movie in the first place. In a word: unfilmable. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it. A lot. But I enjoyed it a bit less than I would have if I knew that everyone else would enjoy it as much. And that's part of what makes a movie like, say, The Dark Knight, great. It lets everyone, fans and not, in on the fun. Isn't it? Update: A week later. Watched the movie again tonight. It's as good if not better on a second watching. However - theater half-empty. At 7 pm on a Saturday. I hate to be right sometimes.

what "web 2.0" really means -- and why "web 3.0" will never come

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 09:16:06 -0800

I generally have a bad reaction to fads but perhaps as strong a reaction to things that can be easily turned into them, or misappropriated as such. "Web 2.0," which Tim O'Reilly & Co. coined back in 2004 (which now feels like a century ago), and that Tim discussed at length in this 2005 Post-FOO Camp article, fits the category. Especially in that now I keep seeing references to "Web 2.1", "Web 3.0", "Web 4.0," and so forth, as if we're dealing with software releases and somehow just incrementing an integer by 1 will turn the wheels of innovation and presto, new world order for everyone...

the quantum of solace script (abridged)

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:00:10 -0800

Spoiler warning: yes, this is a spoof, but it essentially contains the whole plot of the movie. Don't say I didn't warn you. :) Read on after the break...

yes, we can

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:36:25 -0800

Homepage of the New York Times, night of November 4, 2008

there's a singularity for you

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 09:38:35 -0800

The first laptop that got me hooked on the idea that 4 lbs was the maximum weight I'd accept in a portable was the Thinkpad 560e, back in 1998. It was perfect in terms of keyboard size, form factor, and acceptable in weight to carry all the time.

I now use a Macbook Air as my main laptop (I did have a Thinkpad X300 for a while, but had to drop it, but that's another story) and basically we have advanced by shaving off about 1 lb of weight and adding maybe an hour of battery life or so. In 10 years!

Yes, the machines are now faster: faster processors, faster memory, faster hard drives, more resolution. But it's a wash. And I know it's a wash because recently I found my old 560e, from 1998, and booted it. There it went! Windows 98 Second Edition took perhaps 20 seconds or so to boot. Double clicking on Netscape, IE, or Word would bring up the application within a few seconds, no slower than my Macbook Air and definitely faster than the X300 and even some desktops these days.

Web pages may be less interactive in that machine, or not load at all, but you can basically do what you would need to do in most cases (unless you work with high-end graphics, or code, or do numerical analysis...). Btw, the irony of loading up an old machine and being able to open documents like RTF and such, but not navigate the supposedly standards-based Web is rich.

And this isn't confined to Windows -- Linux and even the Mac's System 7 was similar in speed (ok, ok, System 7 was more sluggish). The point is that we've just taken two steps forward and one back.

Don't get me wrong, I like what we have now, and any trifle of advances that we get. But it's 2008. In ten years, we have not, objectively, gotten that far. We have added lots of abstraction layers on top of basically the same functions (as far as PCs are concerned -- the web is a whole other story),

Maybe we'll have to wait for the singularity to show up and give us better, faster, more energy efficient portables and desktops. :)

october, eh?

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:48:57 -0800

Allow me to crack my knuckles before I start.

cracks knuckles.

That's better.

It's been over two months since I posted anything. I really don't know where the hell time goes, but I hope it's warm there.

I just got back (only last week) from a couple of weeks of much-needed vacation.

There's of course the global financial meltdown going on (not to mention the US Presidential election) and so it's fitting that I could spend some time reading When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, both excellent and highly recommended. Up next in my list is The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash, which pretty much called what is happening right now.

I also had a chance to re-read Brave New World and confirmed that it continues to be one of my favorite books of all time. It often happens that re-reading a book after a long time can be perilous: what you thought was great before isn't anymore, and you rediscover not just the book but yourself as you are now, or as you were before ("Wow, I thought this was good? I really was an idiot back then.").

It's good to be back. Now to see if I can keep up blogging in any way, shape or form. :)

More details emerge on the

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:50:31 -0800

More details emerge on the Antikythera mechanism.

I hadn't looked at LyX

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:38:32 -0800

I hadn't looked at LyX in a long time, and it has gotten really good. By now it may be the way to do LaTeX without a lot of complexity, on any platform.

Free ebooks from Tor Books

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:36:36 -0800

Free ebooks from Tor Books (Science Fiction/Fantasy). Awesome. But only until next Sunday!